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Jessica has asked for new comment notifications in frassle. I think most of what she wants will be possible with the frassle publisher. In the publisher, you can build pages out of elements called blocks that contain a list of frassle notes. A note in frassle is a blog post or comment, authored in frassle or read from an external source with the aggregator—we intentionally treat these all the same.

The way you choose which notes show up in a block is by writing a noteset expression. This is a little computer program that frassle reads. Here are a couple of examples.

feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1"
This selects the most recent 10 notes from my blog.

feed="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/xml/rss.xml" | feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1"
This takes the most recent 10 notes from both my blog and j's scratchpad. If I've been slacking and j's written 10 new entries in the last hour, it could be entirely from her blog. But probably it will be mixed. The "|" symbol is pronouced or.

feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1" & body_word_count > 40
Selects the most recent 10 notes from my blog that have over 40 words in their body. This is good for differentiating pointers to random stuff on the web from deeper articles.

feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1" & body_word_count > 40 & cat="/computers"
Articles I've written and categorized under computers.

feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1" & body_word_count > 40 & not( cat="/computers" )
Articles I've written that might be of interest to people who aren't utter geeks.

Now the good part…

responds_to( feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1" )
Recent responses to stuff on my blog! This will include notes where I respond to myself, which is probably not too useful for a "recent comments" list, so we can tweak it:

responds_to( feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1" ) & not( feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1" )
Now we get recent responses to stuff on my blog, but only stuff that I haven't written. I can put this is a block on the side of my page, with "Quick Links List" style to display the commenter's name, date, and the comment title.