Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

dws asks:

How do I discover the usernum for a Radio blog that isn't hosted by http://blogs.salon.com/ or http://radio.weblogs.com? For example how do I find the usernum for http://jrobb.userland.com/ or http://347.com/?

First, most Radio blogs use the radio.weblogs.com comment server (radiocomments.userland.com) for comments, so you can get the server address by clicking on the 'radio.weblogs.com' option in the comment monitor. You can find the usernum by looking at the comment links on the blog itself.

For example, jrobb.userland.com. Mouse over a 'Comment' link and you will see something like:

http://radiocomments.userland.com/comments?u=1026&p=2625&link=http%3A%2F%2Fjrobb.userland.com%2F2002%2F09%2F28.html%23a2625

The usernum is the number after 'u='. In this case, 1026. So you can see John Robb's comments by subscribing to user 1026 on radio.weblogs.com.

Now, 347.com is a different matter because it uses YACCS, Hossein Sharifi's comment service. If you find a blog using YACCS, you don't want to use the comment monitor because YACCS already provides RSS feeds for comments. You can subscribe to a feed for one particular thread by clicking on the 'XML' icon or the coffee mug next to the 'Add a comment' prompt, or you can get a feed for all comments on that blog by looking at the URL on a comments RSS feed (here's one from 347.com):

http://rateyourmusic.com/yaccs/xmlrssthread?b=90000031948&e=335 <-- thread RSS

... and changing it to look like this:

http://rateyourmusic.com/yaccs/xmlrssblog?blog_id=90000031948 <-- blog RSS

You need to change 'xmlrssthread?b=' to 'xmlrssblog?blog_id=' and drop off the '&e=...' bit at the end.

Enjoy ;)