Follow post's comments by email in Blogger

"Isn't this a built-in feature?" Yes and no. You can have post comments delivered to your mail, if you have Blogger/Google account, but not if you are OpenID, non-registered or anonymous commenter. There is the Subscribe to Post Comments (Atom) -link, maybe spiced up with RSS icon, but many people don't know what to do with that feed link. So something more user friendly would be nice.

With this little hack you can offer your reader an easy way to subscribe to new comments of a post and get them delivered to reader's email. I use blogtrottr.com feed-to-email service in this hack. I wanted to place the email subscription form beneath the RSS link, which was bit tricky but succeeded. Because RSS feed url opens in new window (target="_blank"), I made the form open its results in target="_blank", too.

Installation is easy, if you know your way around. Open template html for editing. Select Expand widget templates. Search lines:

    <!-- feed links -->
    <b:include name='feedLinks'/>

After those line add:

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Now your readers can subscribe to those posts' comments they are interested in. It works either by user entering email address in the form (form has very basic email validation) and clicking the subscribe button, or just by clicking the button, which opens Blogtrottr page where email is asked.

You can test this and my other comments hacks at Playground for Blogger threaded comments.