Commentful – tracking comments
As part of the 31 Days to Better Blogging challenge, I needed to leave comments on blogs that I hadn’t commented on before. This is one of my favourite parts of blogging and I like to check back and see if there are any comments about my comment – ie continuing the conversation.
Over the past few weeks Sue Water’s has made numerous comments on my blog and I was curious as to how she knew that there were new comments to comment on.
Sue pointed me towards co.mment, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be allowing new users to register.
A quick Google search brought Commentful to my attention.
With commentful, you need to download and install a FireFox Extension so that functionality is added to your browser.
To use commentful, you right-click on a blog page and a pop-up menu appears with the choice of adding the feed to commentful (see post image).
Commentful also places a coloured circle in the display bar at the base of your browser window. It is usually yellow and turns green when it detects that a new comment has been made. I found over a 2 day period that my circle was always yellow. So, by clicking on it, a browser window opened with a list of the blog feeds that I have added. There is an option to click on a “check” button next to each blog in the list, which I did and then I noticed that the circle had turned green. I’m not sure if this happened before I pressed ‘check’ or after the first check.
While it isn’t quite working how I want (I want the button to go green without me going to the feeds page), it is still much more convenient than actually going to every blog. I also suspect that it is checking for comments on the entire blog and not just the post that you commented on, which is also a little disappointing. But, it does open to the actual blog post.
Overall, I would rate it as useful but not perfect.
What do you use to keep track of comments on your blogroll?
Have you found something better than commentful, let me know?
