Some assembly required

This blog is about unimplemented ideas. At least until they get ticked off; I suppose a few eventually will have implementations too, but fresh posts never will. Because that's the primary purpose of this blog: keeping track of ideas I'd like to dive into, or problems I'd like to see solved. Feel free to join me in implementing, or further developing these ideas. I don't mind working solo, but it's a whole lot more fun working in concert!

Saturday, December 03, 2005

Comments Feed for Blogger

This Hack Has Been Completed

The fully functional hack, with the extra features mentioned in the comments working, is available at http://bloggercomments.ning.com/. I have also written a page of instructions on setting up your blog to work with the service.



If I understand rightly the way the Farrago Recent Comments Hack works, then the recent comments on Blogger blogs could be output to the sidebar, or to an invisible section, in a similar manner but without the javascript and in a standard format that included the contents of the comment. Such could be styled / scripted to display as the blog owner wished, or to not display at all, as long as such did not alter the ability to parse the section (perhaps even using an easy-to-parse structure such as XOXO).

A server-side script could then be run on another server (or even, perhaps, on Ning, although I'm not sure this use would be acceptable given the purpose of the site) that would parse this section out of the Blogger page and use it to generate an RSS feed from the data. Thus a real-time, custom, properly encoded comments feed could be generated for a Blogger blog.

Update: Such a use would not be outside of the terms of use on Ning, however they will not allow you to use any GPL code, due to licensing restrictions, which means among other things that my XOXO library couldn't be used.