About a week ago, Michael Stephens mentioned parenthetically “I think I need a way to offer comments as a feed….“. Since I have a comments feed for See Also, I copied my template, made a few small changes and sent it to Michael. He seemed to appreciate it.

So I thought that other Movable Type types might want to copy that file, too. Here it is: comments.xml Looks like that file is kaput. Try this one: Movable Type comments RSS 2.0 feed. (Right-click (Macintosh users ctrl-click) to download this file to your computer.)

One of the things I like about this particular comments feed is that it provides a bit more context than comment feeds often do. The headline in the aggregator will say “Comment by [name] on [blog post title]“. The main body of the feed contains the entire comment, followed by an excerpt of the original post. There are links to the comment, the commenter’s URL (if provided), and to the original post.

This template should work for Movable Type 3.2 with a minimum of customization on your part. To use, create a new index template on the Templates screen in Movable Type. I gave mine the name “RSS 2.0 Comments” and the filename “comments.xml”, but I expect you could call it anything that ends in “.xml”.

Movable Type will automatically replace the MT template tags in the document with the name, description, URL, etc. of your blog (as well as the appropriate comments, of course). You do need to specify a URL for an image (if you would like your blog logo to show in certain feed readers) and text for a copyright statement. See the comments in the template file itself for guidance as to where to put that information..

Once you have it set up, the URL will be http://[your blog url]/comments.xml (or whatever filename you gave it). Load that URL in your browser. It will look like
unformatted XML (like my raw comments feed), but you should be able to read it well enough to be sure it is pulling the appropriate comments from your blog.

If you have experience using the template tags for your blogging software, this kind of feed is pretty easy to write. I just looked at the stock MT feeds for the entries, referred to the RSS 2.0 specification and did a little troubleshooting when I made this feed.

One last caveat: it looks like almost no one subscribes to my comments feed! That’s OK, because it is useful to me. And if I can get some more good discussions going here in the future, perhaps more people will want to pick it up.