Trying to Add a Comment Feed to This Blog

(UPDATE JAN.3: I solved this problem, and now have a working comment feed...)

As I mentioned in the comment thread to my posting earlier today, "I Wish Blog Comments Were Easier to Follow," comment feeds can be extremely useful in making conversations that occur in blog comments more findable.

That's important, because people can't join conversations that they don't find.

...Which means, of course, I really need to get a comment feed up and running for this blog. Unfortunately, Typepad doesn't offer a standard comment-feed option. Hopefully they'll introduce that feature later. But for now, I've found what seems to be a pretty good hack, courtesy of Matthew Oliphant. I think I've almost got it to work. However, I could use some help in troubleshooting a problem I'm having with it.

If you're knowledgeable about Typepad and interested in helping me figure this out, here's what you can do...

First, read Matthew's posting so you understand the solution he suggests.

I followed his instructions exactly. The code he supplied now generates the following file from this blog: comments.xml

If you view that file in a text editor, you'll see that it does indeed contain all the content from recent comments to this weblog.

THE PROBLEM: This XML file is not a valid feed. None of my feed readers will recognize it or discover it.

I plugged it into the Feed Validator site, and was told that that the very first line of code in this file does not validate. Specifically, here's what Feed Validator told me:

line 1, column 30: XML parsing error: <unknown>:1:30: XML declaration not well-formed

The line of code from my comments.xml it referred to was:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding=""?>

This was generated by the first line of Matthew's suggested code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="<MTPublishCharset>"?>

...Now the trouble is, I'm not a coder. I'm pretty good at using online tools, but I don't know the ins and outs of Typepad's MT tags, or hand-coding feeds, to be able to set this right on my own.

So I could use some help. If you've got any ideas, please comment below or e-mail me. Thanks!

Comments

[Matthew Oliphant]

I updated my post to reflect changes that should keep the feed working and make it more valid.

[Mike Sansone]

Amy - I'm also converting my "brochure" site to all typepad, including the static pages.

I'm also not a coder, though I have been toying with the MT tags and Typepad's new help system. So far, so good - though I've had to go to Advanced Templates.

I know you can RSS the trackbacks using the mt-tb.cgi. Maybe the same is true with mt-comments.cgi. When I find out, I'l let you know (unless you find out first.

Keep up the great work.

[senatorhung]

hey amy,

i dloaded your original comments.xml file and opened it up in notepad. all of the tags in the file are preceded by 3 blank spaces which is what's causing the error. i removed the 3 spaces at the very beginning of the feed and loaded it up to my server to test - this validated fine. i'm not sure how to get typepad to stop doing that, but i'm sure someone else can troubleshoot that bit down, or you can just manually edit them out with notepad (post-typepad) and reload to the server yourself.

i just figured out how to manually code these webfeed things over the weekend (for details, see http://209.115.175.51/index.html#20051230 - will have a different permalink in a couple of weeks). while i'm a laggard at adopting new tech (a bit embarassing with my engineering background), knowing how to learn from the previous experiences of others has been especially valuable and i thank you for your ongoing proselytizing about feeds which helped give me that extra boost to delve into them.

[Matthew Oliphant]

I noticed those blank spaces too, but again, I got the feed to work. And I have 7 new comments showing up in Bloglines from your comments feed:

http://rightconversation.com/comments.xml

[Amy Gahran]

OK, so the problem is halfway solved for now. When I tried the updated code Matthew so kindly posted, my comment feed started working in Bloglines and Google Reader. However, it's still not working in Sage and Newsgator. Those readers don't recognize a feed as existing at http://rightconversation.com/comments.xml at all.

Right now Feedburner is down -- but when that service is back up I'll see if it recognizes a feed at that address. If so, I might be able to use Feedburner to reformat it in a way that's discoverable and readable in any feed reader.

Regarding the three blank spaces -- I didn't notice that, so thanks for pointing that out. Not sure what to do about that, though. As I said, I'm not a coder, so I need to keep my solutions fairly technically simple.

Thanks to everyone who's been heling me out with this.

[Amy Gahran]

Another update -- Feedburner doesn't recognize a valid feed at that address, either :-(

- Amy Gahran