Blog Comments and RSS Feeds

Vagabond Journey.com Travelogue: Blog Comments and RSS Feeds

9 years of vagabond travel throu 9 years of vagabond travel through over 45 countries on 5 continents.

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Wade from www.VagabondJourney.com has been continuously traveling around the world for more than 9 years through ov for more than 9 years through over 45 countries on 5 continents. He is open to answer all questions - email Vagabondsong@gmail.com. Walk Slow.

Blog Comments and RSS Feeds

I recently received this comment from a long term reader and regular commenter:

"While you ponder how to modify your web page as you tweak it, consider comments. I would love it if there was some way to look and see what posts have new comments. Something like travelvice.com has on the top of his log, but longer and with dates so I can quickly look and see if there is a new comment since the last time I checked them."

I have also gotten similar requests from other readers about the accessibility of comments and the lack of RSS feeds that go with this new, hand-made, version of this travelogue.

Craig from Travelvice.com went as far as saying, "gag, what a mess. But what will become of my RSS feed for your site now? Self-published pages but no feed for me? "

I wish there was some way that I could appease these requests, but I feel as if my hands tied with the travelogue comments and I have no idea how to attach an RSS feed to this blog.
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Wade from Vagabond Journey.com
in Upstate New York, USA- January 1, 2009
Travelogue -- Travel Photos -- Travel Guide
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There are advantages and disadvantages to everything. By leaving Blogger I have simplified Vagabond Journey.com, but I lost a few of the perks that came with using a blogging system. I now enter all the information on Vagabond Journey.com manually: there are no more widgets, fancy gadgetry, or reader friendly technological spoofs. The code to this travelogue is all done by me and is insanely simple, basic HTML. There are no tricks, and I do not have the knowledge to pull tricks even if I had wanted to.

The main advantages to having my travelogue completely manual is that I do not have to rely on another website to publish and my on-internet time is drastically reduced. Blogger has only periodically been working for this past week, and I do not want to take any chances when out traveling that my blogging service will not function properly. By publishing the site myself, I do not need to log into a website and copy and paste in my content, which greatly reduces the amount of time that I need to be online, as I can fully make my pages without an internet connection and then publish them in a only a few moments of internet time with a simple FTP program.

Traveling is about self-reliance, and this is a large part of what this travelogue is about. So how can I justify relying on a Leviathan of outside support to publish this blog? I can't. For me to live my words I must rely on myself, I must publish my entire website myself and make the pages by hand.

But there are major disadvantages to this. Simply put, I cannot coordinate and arrange the comments as well as Blogger does. I have had a couple of requests for the amounts of comments that each entry has to be included on the index page. I would like to do this, but if I were to do so it would need to be done manually - I would physically need to constantly type in how many comments each entry has. This could be done, but it would take a decent amount of man-time to do, and I fear that I would be prone to making mistakes, being inconsistent, and having the travelogue being a little too sloppy.

If I can figure out a simple way to have the number of comments show on the index page automatically, I will of course do it. But right now I do not have the knowledge base to do this. In fact, the comment forms for this travelogue are Google Docs applications and I copy and paste the comments into the entries manually.

I can only hope that this way of publishing the travelogue is not overly cumbersome. Feel free to leave any suggestions in the comments below.

Thank you.

Walk Slow,

Wade

Comment on this travelogue entry

Blog Comments and RSS Feeds

Reader Comments:

Mercury says . . .

Random thoughts: no man is an island. Whenever you travel you are reliant on airline pilots, security, baggage handlers, financiers who launched the company etc.. Eat food and you are counting on cooks, waiters, farmers, truckers, and again financiers. Trains ditto, buses tambien. You get the idea. Short of moving to a lost valley in the himalaya and growing all your own food, no one is really independent. We are all interdependent. Like it or not that's how it works. You are still counting on hostmonster not to mention the people responsible for the internet itself. All you've done is cut out one link. And for that you've sacrificed a lot. Bloggers may not want to hear this; but comments are a crucial part of any blog. Its not all about you. I read for motorcycle bob's, cym's, g's and barron's comments as much as you (not to detract from you). A good blogger attracts good comments. You attract good comments at least until you made your own platform. The blogger is a moderator of the discussion as much as anything. You launch the ideas and steer the dialogue. You have always done that well. But this new setup will kill the blog aspect of the site. You'll still get readers for your tips, travel questions, and pictures but the blog part will die off without thougtful comments. I would seriously look at wordpress. It takes a day or two to learn but after that is incredibly easy to use. There's no way that entering your own code could be easier. Wordpress is just really easy to use. The odds of it breaking down aren't probably much greater than of your pilot getting drunk and crashing into the ocean. Possible but unlikely.

Wade says . . .

Thank you Mercury, I appreciate your feedback. Your comment brings up some very good points.

1/2/2009 20:45:01 Cym from http://natural-nomad.blogspot.com/ says . . .

Hey Wade,

Personally I think you should have stuck with blogger awhile longer, at least until you worked out all the bugs, and learned how to add all the features you needed before you made the official switch; because having a clean comments interface and working RSS feed are essential if you want this blog to continue growing. Just seems to me that for the sake of simplifying things, in a way you actually made things more difficult. Also what's wrong with Blogger? Seems to me that Blogger is the perfect publishing tool for vagabonds on a budget, why, because its free! And is mostly reliable (I've been using it for 3 years without any problems whatsoever. I'm not a computer expert, but I was thinking that maybe your problems with it could have had something to do with your recently importing all the old entries from Open Road Song?) allows advertising, offers plenty of useful ready-made widgets, and endless customization. If you just want to focus on writing, why would you want to add the extra burden of having to hand code everything from scratch? That's just more work, and there's more of a likelihood for errors.

But anyways the reason why I commented was to suggest http://www.haloscan.com, a free commenting system. Don't know if it'll be compatible with your site, but its worth checking out.

Good luck with everything!

Wade says . . .

Thank you, Cym, for the suggestions. I responded to your comment at Blogging Content Management Systems No Good for Traveling Webmasters.