Blogger's Feeds are Slower than a Third Party Add-on?

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!

Recent Comments for Blogger and Blogger Beta

Hey! I just finished updating my Recent Comments add-on for Blogger to also support the new Blogger Beta.

"But, Blogger Beta can already do Recent Comments!" You might interject. Yes, well... This is a little nicer, because it also has a comment history "More..." and a lot of tweaks to be able to customize its look and feel. It isn't just a Feed, although it does provide a Comment Feed (although this part by itself won't be very helpful I suppose, since Blogger Beta also does a Comment Feed now.)

In the future, I'm going to update the module to grab the comments automatically from the Blogger Comment Feed so that you won't even have to set the Comment Notification Email to make this work.

New Blog Tools!

I'm going to be using this blog to review a few existing and even some newly created (by me!) blog tools to help people using Blogger and other blog services.