I Wonder If I Have OCD?

I discovered a very useful way to follow the comments on my blog and, at the request of Sue Davis, am sharing it with anyone who is interested.

Being somewhat neurotic about feedback, I found myself incessantly checking my blog to see if anyone had made any comments about what I had written. I wonder if I have OCD? Hmmm...once again I digress. This required a lot of clicks to navigate the sign-in, etc. and was rather inconvenient. While playing with some of the options for layout, etc. I discovered a very cool little "gadget" that solved all of my problems. It allows me, or anyone else for that matter, to subscribe to an RSS feed of the posts and/or the comments on my blog. (By the way there are lots of really cool gadgets there that do all kinds of neat stuff.)

Problem solved!!! Because RSS pushes the data to me when there are updates to my blog's posts and comments I don't have to keep checking (and worrying about how neurotic I am being).

To add the "gadget" to you Blooger blog, login to Blogger. When you get to the "Dashboard" click on the "Layout" link for your blog and click on the "add gadget' link in the box where you want the link to appear. I put mine up near the top so people would see it even if they didn't scroll down.

Now, you need to find the right gadget. There are a lot of them and unfortunately no way for me to give you a direct link. When the new window opens, scroll down until you see a gadget called "Subscription Link" (it's made by Blogger). Change the title if you want and then click "Save".

The final step is to subscribe to your own comments in your RSS reader. I use Google Reader so it was automatic once I selected it.

Voila! Now you get a feed of the comments made to your blog. No more logging in!!!

I am not sure if adding the gadget is necessary to get the RSS feed going from the Blogger end of things. The address for the posts feed for my blog is simply http://daleroach.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default and for the comments is http://daleroach.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default. You may be able to simply modify this for your own blog by replacing "daleroach" with whatever address you chose for your blog and manually enter the subscription into your reader. Adding the gadget does add some good functionality to your blog though.

I hope this is useful. Please comment...I should be able to reply quickly as I am addicted to Google Reader and feedback.

Thanks for reading.