Let your (Post) feed subscribers see a comments count

If a visitor subscribes to the main RSS feed from an Exc-el WPMU blog, they’ll see the recent Posts, but not the corresponding Comments. To see if there are any comments on a given Post, they’ve got these choices:

  • subscribe to the Comments feed, and use that by:
    • going to the comments feed in their aggregator, then
    • browsing through the list of comments looking for matching titles
  • visit the blog itself, and look at the comments count there
  • click the Comments link for each post to actively look for Comments on a given Post

Any of these requires a bit of clicking around. Wouldn’t it be good to avoid that?

Get Comments Count in actionJoe Tan’s Get Comments Count plug-in helps bridge that little usability gap. It adds a small image into the Post feed which displays a count of the Comments for each Post. Using this, you can tell your Post Feed subscribers exactly how many comments there are on a given post – without them having to journey anywhere else to find out.

It’s now installed on Exc-el and can be activated from the Plug-In menu. You can see it working on the feed for this blog’s posts at https://www.edubuzz.org/david/feed.