Keeping track of comments — the quick and dirty way
February 10th, 2007I have looked at reviews on automated comment management plugins. Nothing seems perfect. I suggest a basic low-tech semi-manual approach that can help you follow-up on comments you have left in blogs. I describe it with Firefox. If you have Safari or Opera, I would not know, but it should be similar. If you have IE, get Firefox.
- Display your bookmarks as a sidebar (View/Sidebar/Bookmarks)
- Create a new folder (’Commented Posts’)
- When you have submitted a comment, drag the small icon to the left of the http://etc… url in the navigation bar of the browser to that folder.
On a later session, when you want to check comment activity on the posts where you had left comments, right-click the ‘Commented Posts’ bookmark folder and choose ‘Open in Tabs’ from the context menu. This will open all of them at once. All you have to do now is select the bookmarks you want to stop following (either because the discussion has ended or because nobody’s answering after X days) and either hit del or right-click and choose delete.
For people like me who leave at most a few comments a day, this might be a sustainable way to manage comments.
Thanks for this idea — I’m going to try it and see how I like it. It’s easy to keep track of comments on wordpress blogs, but I can use this for all those other blogs I’d like to keep track of. Until I read your post, it hadn’t occurred to me that I might want such a method, but now I realize it could work quite well … thanks!
You are welcome. By the way, you need to re-enter your URI when you leave a comment here: it seems your browser fills it in automatically with the old blogspot.com address. I have edited the ones I found.
Got it — thanks!
You might want to check coComment. It’s a nice service, which works even better with browser plugin. You can enable or disable it with one click of a mouth, or use automatic settings. Whenever you leave a comment anywhere, it’ll track the discussion and will notify you in a non-disturbing way. You can stop tracking, find similar discussions, tag comments and threads, subscribe to RSS feeds, and so on and so forth.
I don’t know all the magic behind it, but it works pretty good for me.
This naturally does not fall into the ‘quick and dirty’ category, but I might as well give it a try.