I couldn't resist showing off discovery. Blogger's built-in feed actually has a slower turn around time than my Third Party add-on. Upon consideration, this makes a whole lot of sense: Their feed module isn't intended to handle Recent Comments, so I am assuming it tries to be graceful and only download a feed every so-often (maybe a half hour?) keeping a cached copy in the meantime. This is good manners when retrieving foreign feeds so that you don't eat up someone's bandwidth, and is in fact the default behavior in some RSS/Atom feed processing tools like
MagpieRSS.
I wonder why they didn't make "Recent Comments" a true out-of-the-package widget that can be added to your sidebar?
I'd like to say that I'm up for designing other sidebar modules for people who want something special, and I'll probably design anything as long as it will be useful for more than one person, so just let me know what you're looking for!
14 comments:
Jeff,
But couldn't you add a ? at the end of the feed address in the feed widget to get a live update and not one from a cache?
Ron
Ronner,
Good idea. I'll try that.
I changed it to have a ?, and it still doesn't reflect your comment from over ten minutes ago. It is a mystery to me how they could even get it to update so slowly. I think the feed itself has a lag too.
Yeah - I'm experiencing the same lag myself; it's annoying. It can go hours and hours without updating. I can go into the widget and futz with going back and forth between .../summary and ../full, putting the ? in, and so on, and sometimes it will refresh, and sometimes it won't. I'm stumped. I've done google searches to find anyone addressing this, and I can't find anything. Are we the only ones who have this problem, or the only ones it bugs? :)
Ronner,
Well, technically it doesn't bug me so much because I'm using my own Recent Comments Add-on :) but if I was including an external RSS feed from another site it would be slightly annoying. I don't think Google created the feed widget with Recent Comments in mind, but rather to syndicate external content, which imho is acceptable with even as long as a 24 hour refresh. Problem with the lag on recent comments is it throws a wrench in allowing the feed to foster the immediate interaction that several users commenting can create.
Jeff,
I'm using your comment add-on, too. But it still bugs me. :)
What if you want to use your add on tool, but want to keep your site less accesible? It's a site about my family for other family members...
Anonymous,
What do you propose to make it adequate for your purposes? Would an option to "unlist" your blog from the syndicated list at http://www.storago.com/recom.php be sufficient?
~Jeff
yes, that would be outstanding. is that an option?
thank you for the reply and thank for creating this. the google help forum has several requests for something like this. maybe i'll link you site from that forum.
Anonymous,
For several days now I've had an option to unlist a blog from the syndicated page. Even with this option on, the atom feed and the sidebar add-in all still work, it just prevents your blog from being listed on my site. I hope you find this useful, and sorry for taking so long to announce it here.
~Jeff
I suppose I see your point in a way about the comment archive of your, my, and similar hacks -- although comments are archived on post pages, so I'm not sure I entirely understand the point. One thing to note about sidebar modules is that if you want to use the new BETA feeds in the sidebar with instant update and fast response time you would use the new JSON feeds...
I've just upgraded the server and we should be getting faster updates now, as well as faster load times on the javascript widget. Enjoy.
I'm gonna test how fast this shows up in your sidebar....
i love this add-on. i just wish there were a way to format more recent comments to show up on the page itself. 10 or more? is that even remotely feasible?
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