My idea for a cool WordPress Plugin: tracking comments on external blogs

Posted on March 9th, 2008 by Richard Catto 3,233 views

The Scenario

You come across a blogger that you enjoy reading. It’s easy to read their posts and follow all their comments on their blog, simply by browsing around their blog or subscribing to their posts and comments feeds.

However if you want to follow (stalk) their comments on other blogs, it is not so easy. In fact even remembering where all you last commented yourself is not easy to keep track of.

Many of my favourite blogs have now installed a “subscribe to comments” plugin (some at my suggestion) which emails me whenever a subscribed to thread gets a new comment. This is a huge help to me and it has resulted in a lot more comments being made on blogs which have this plugin installed.

Now I wish to propose a new comment tracking plugin: the ability for all my comments on external blogs to be listed on my own blog so that my readers (and I) can easily follow my activities around the blogosphere.

Architecture

As I comment on another blog, I want that blog to send an external comment pingback to the url I supplied. The external comment pingback should include the following information:

• comment author (the name I supplied)
• comment author email address (the email address I supplied)
• my url (the url I supplied)
• their url (the url of the blog post I commented on)
• comment title (WordPress currently does not support comment titles)
• full text of the comment I made

My blog should receive this into an external comment moderation queue and, depending on what options I have selected, be either held privately for my eyes only or be published for all to see. Each individual external comment could be either deleted from the queue, marked private so that only I can see it or published for everyone to view. Editing should not be an option for obvious reasons.

I should be able to publish my list of external comments on a sidebar widget, in a page, in a post or in an RSS feed.

The above situation would require a plugin to be installed on both my blogs and all the external blogs that I comment on.

Effects of this proposed plugin on the blogosphere

I think the benefit of this plugin would be that all the blogs I comment on would receive additional readers and comments because it would enable my readers to easily hop on over to see what I (and others) had said on the blog post I had commented on.

I feel I have addressed the potential objection that some would raise around privacy issues by giving the blog owner the ability to decide which external comments to publish.

Non-WordPress blogs

Any blog platform should be able to write a plugin to dovetail with this external comment pingback protocol by inspecting the WordPress plugin open source code.

It would be desireable that as many blog platforms as possible implement this ability so that it was universal no matter what kind of external blog I leave a comment on.

Implementation

I’ve never written a WordPress plugin before, so I don’t know how to do this right now. I would have to find out. I know that many technical people read my blog, and if you would like to write this plugin, I would be happy to work with you on this project.

Tags: external comment pingback, Plugin
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