How do you track comments?

Just wondering how people deal with comments. I don’t mean on your blog, but rather on posts you’re interested in reading the responses to or that you’ve responded to.

You could bookmark that post/page, subscribe to an RSS feed to that post or blog if they offer one or …?

This site has a feed for every post (and that may be a default behavior of WordPress) but that usually involves a few extra steps in order to keep track.

For the last few months, I’ve been using Co.mments.com thanks to a tip I got on Twitter from Jonathan Snook. It works very simply: you simply drag a link to your favorites/links bar and as you surf just click on it when you are on a page with comments you want to track. Then when you want to see if there has been any new responses, just visit the co.mments tracking page (you create a free account first or just use a cookie) and it will display the latest responses to any tracked posts. It doesn’t seem to matter how the site is built or displays comments, it seems to figure things out pretty well.

Another nice thing is that you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your tracking page so you can just through that in your feed reader and check it like any other feed. They do offer an email digest of any new comments as well but I found it to be too far behind….I’m impatient.

For a free service, it’s pretty solid….occasionally it’s a little slow to respond but overall I recommend it if you want an easy, passive way to keep track of any discussions or debates on a blog.