Like a lot of ex-20six-ers I’ve moved to WordPress and am still getting to grips with it (ooh, the raw power!).

One of the things I miss from 20six is being subscribed to any comments once you’ve made a comment in someone else’s blog. I have a few ideas on how to fix that – but that’s for another day. Today I’m going to tell you how you can keep track of comments.

The sharp-eyed amongst you might have already noticed that WordPress is quite good at providing RSS feeds. For blogs you can generally find the feed for the whole blog at [blog address]/feed/ – for example my article feed is here: http://technobubble.info/feed/
But here comes the clever bit – you can also get a feed of comments for each post in a blog, again usually by adding /feed/ on the end of the address.

So, what do do with all these feeds? Well I use Bloglines, which is a fee web service that will give you a simple web page full of all the feeds you are subscribed to. You can just go to Bloglines and (once registered) add a feed from the post URL – it will figure out the /feed/ bit by itself.

However, if you want to tinker with your WordPress blog and make it a teeny bit easier for people to do, you can edit your theme to put a direct link to Bloglines that will add your comments feed. I’ve done it for my site – see at the bottom of this article there will be a line that says something like “RSS feeds for comments on this post. Add Comment Feed to Bloglines.”

So, you need to find which file in your theme to edit. For my theme is was comments.php, but it can vary. Just find whichever line talks about RSS feeds for comments and stick it near there. The magical bit of PHP code you need to add is:

<a href="http://www.bloglines.com/sub/
<?php echo comments_rss(); ?>">
Add Comment Feed to <abbr title="Bloglines in an online RSS feed syndication service">Bloglines</abbr>.</a>

This will put a link on your page that readers can click on and go straight to the right bit of bloglines. the ?php bit just finds the link to the comment feed and then adds it to the Bloglines subscribe address, which is http://www.bloglines.com/sub/[link-to-subscribe]

Anyway – hope that’s clear. I might share more of my “things I’ve worked out about WordPress” here if people are interested? Hopefully it will be of help us make lovely blogs!