RSS Bandit & s9y

[Don Chambers]

Garvin introduced me to RSS Bandit, and it sure looks sweet. I am completely new to this whole RSS thing.

I typed in my blog url, and let it "autodetect". It seems to default to the rss2 feed. For my own blog, I have the update set to every 15 minutes. I definitely get the pop-up window when a new entry is added. However, I do not get any notification when comments are posted to those entries. Comments do show up nicely in a tree format in the rss bandit window, but only if I manually update the feed.

I tried switching the url to the default for rss2 comments. Under that scenario, comments do trigger notification, but then appear in the rss bandit feed detail window at the same tree level as entries (and also appear a second time, nested under the entry.

Is there something I can do, either in s9y, or in rss bandit (for those familiar with it) that would trigger notification for comments, but retain the normal tree structure shown when using the rss2 feed? In other words, I prefer the format presented when the rss2 feed is used because comments are ONLY shown in their nested position (Not twice), and I like that rss bandit displays the author name in the "topic" column in that format. I also don't like that "comments" is appended to my blog name when using the rss2 comments feed.

[garvinhicking]

The behaviour with comments is intentional. You wouldn't want RSS bandit to fetch all comment feeds periodically. It only does this when you click on an entry.

The same goes if you subscribe to the comment feed: Comment feeds to show comments just like entries, this is meant to be this way.

In your case I suggest you to subscribe to both feeds, that's how I do it. There's no other way; you could only try to ask the RSS Bandit people if they provide an option to poll the RSS entries for comments just like fetching entries. Chances are they reply with the answer "No, we don't do this because of bandwidth reasons".

The "comment" is appended to the comment feed because that is the usual default. You can edit your rss.php file to change that if you need it, but I discourage changing that.

Best regards,
Garvin

[Don Chambers]

Thanks Garvin - I will give that a try.

Also - for those using email only. Is there a way to allow a user to "subscribe" to an entry without actually commenting on it?

[garvinhicking]

I'm afraid this subscription method is not implemented; so currently users would need to subscribe to the RSS feed of your entry to receive comments only for that entry.

Best regards,
Garvin

[Don Chambers]

Consider this a feature request then! Lots of people are still a long way from being regular users of RSS.... a button to "subscribe without comment" (or something like that) would be nice.