Have you ever been reading a blog post, posted a comment and wanted to keep an eye on what other people had to say? And been frustrated that there’s no apparent way to subscribe to the comments to avoid re-visiting over and over to check for replies?
On WordPress, you have an option to subscribe to every post’s individual comment feed built into the code. While not all WordPress themes actually provide a link to the feed, you can still subscribe very easily:
Take the post’s url (or permalink), add feed/ at the end and your browser should now offer you the normal syndication subscription options you’re used to.
For instance to subscribe to this post, you’d simply browse to http://altitis.treehuggers.info/2008/06/02/accessing-wordpress-blogs-comment-feed/feed/ and then follow up on all comments posted in your feed reader.
This works both with self-hosted WordPress blogs and WordPress.com hosted blogs.
For self-hosted bloggers, if you want to add the link to a post’s feed into your template, you will have to edit single.php in your theme files, and insert the following piece of code in there, probably in the post metadata section:
<?php post_comments_feed_link('RSS 2.0'); ?>
Simple as that.
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What a brilliant tip! I’d just commented on a blog and forgot to click their box to get e-mailed any replies. I was kicking myself because it’s on a post by a plugin author and I’m hoping for a response to fix my problem. Your post was very timely indeed
Glad you found it helpful