One of the benefits of keeping a blog going for the past 10 years is the web programming that I've had to learn. Now I don't know very much, mind you, but only enough to be dangerous. The ability to make little tweaks to a webpage is pretty handy, and since I don't come from a programming background I've taught myself little things here and there.

The latest thing I've been trying to do is get the comment count to show up in Google Reader. I've read that most people who look at posts in an RSS feed reader usually only read the content there rather than click through to the actual article on the originating website (unless only part of the post is published in the feed, and people are forced to click through, but why be greedy like that?). Plus who has the time in 2010 to be visiting all these sites individually. So there's great benefit to adding more interactivity on the RSS side of things.

I've been trying to implement this feature through this RSS namespace called wfw or Well-Formed Web. It's an easy feature to activate if you run your website using Movable Type or Wordpress, but for us Joomla! folks, it requires a bit more software trickery. The feature has to do with how your website outputs information, so I've been reading into PHP, RSS, CSS, and some extra HTML. The closest I've gotten to a working version is to have a comments link on only the most latest blog post. I have no idea why its buggy like that but I'm a researcher not a programmer. I'm gonna keep at it.