Greater Greater Washington now sports several new features that you’ve been asking for: More RSS feeds, and the ability to subscribe to email notifications of comments without commenting.

On the RSS feeds, there’s always been a main RSS feed for all posts. That’s available on any page in the “subscribe” box on the left sidebar, and through your browser’s “RSS autodiscovery,” the feature where your browser will show an orange feed icon at the right end of the address bar (in Firefox) or somewhere similar when a page tells it there’s an RSS feed.

Now, in addition to those, there are RSS feeds for any other page with posts or comments. Any page showing posts for a particular author, tag, or category has an RSS feed in the subscribe box and the autodiscovery area for that author, tag, or category. The recent comments page contains the RSS feed for that page, and any individual post page will give you the RSS feeds for comments on that post as well as the posts by that author.

Therefore, if you’re only interested in reading Michael Perkins’ posts, posts about Fairfax County, or historic preservation-related posts, you can now subscribe to these in a blog reader using RSS if you so choose. If there are any RSS feeds you could possibly think of that aren’t now available, just ask.

Second is a feature several people have requested: the ability to get emails when someone comments on a post without having to comment yourself. Right now, you can subscribe to these emails when you comment, but some people want to subscribe when they see an interesting post yet don’t have anything to say themselves.

There’s a new “subscribe without commenting” link on the comment form next to the checkbox to subscribe when you comment. If you click that, you can now, as the name suggests, subscribe without commenting. Of course, if you do have something to say, please comment AND subscribe!

As with all new features, if you run into any problems, please let me know. I get automatic notifications when certain types of error messages show up on the site, but sometimes I don’t know if you’re encountering a bug. Instead of assuming I know, please speak up in the comments on this post or by email.

Any other requests?

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.