BCBlog

On any article page, in the RSS section, you should now see an option for ‘Comments on this article’ which links to what you might expect: an RSS feed with the most recent comments for that article. If you’re trying to keep up with a conversation, you can add that feed to your aggregator of choice and then you’ll always know when new comments have appeared!

In fact, you may also notice that hovering over the RSS feeds causes a new box to pop up with subscription options. I’ve been concerned for some time about how ugly RSS feeds look when you click on them in boring web browsers like Internet Explorer. While Safari users (like me) get a nicely-formatted listing, most people just get the raw XML. But with the new popup, you can choose to subscribe to the feed in any one of a number of aggregators, including web-based tools like Bloglines and My Yahoo!

I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to provide a feed of comments for all articles, or maybe per-section, but the challenges there aren’t techincal, but logistical. Most well-behaved aggregators poll for updates once an hour, and some less often than that. Blogcritics.org receives enough comments within an hour to make for a very large file, which wouldn’t be a good thing for our bandwidth bill. For now I’ve decided to start with per-article feeds, so that you can follow the conversations with which you’re most interested, but eventually I’ll probably add something more comprehensive.

I’ve considered building a feed that includes all comments posted in the previous 61 minutes, but that could sometimes be very few (in the wee hours of the morning) and sometimes be an astounding number of comments. A feed of just the most recent X comments will always result in missed comments, unless X is in the hundreds. So I’m not sure, and I welcome suggestions.

By the way, that reminds me that these comment feeds also don’t necessarily contain all comments for an article; just the most recent 25.

Enjoy!

It isn’t often that we created entirely new sections at Blogcritics.org. The last one was Politics, if I remember rightly, and that was quite some time ago. However, today we’ve launched two new sections, and we’ve got a couple more in the hopper!

Just in time for the launch of the Xbox 360 tonight at midnight, Blogcritics.org Gaming! Editor Ken Edwards is busily testing out his Xbox 360 even now, prior to the official release, and has taken the lead in attracting writers and publishers to this new section. Drop by and check out the open comments page!

Also new and ready for a flood of Thanksgiving week articles is Blogcritics.org Sports! Editor Matthew T. Sussman — or “Suss” as he is known when he isn’t being all editor-like — charges ahead with sporting metaphors a-plenty, ready to take on your objections to his omission of hockey from the list of approved topics (hint, hint) and anything else. Bring it on!

That’s all for now, but there is always more to come, and new stuff just around the corner!