I spent some time reading a lot of blogs over the weekend to try and spark some ideas on how I could make this place better. I found that many blogs have a widget called the “Top Commentators Widget.” It allows you to have a sidebar widget with the people that comment the most on your blog (hence the name). Well I have tried a few of these types of plugins out a while back and couldn’t get any of them to work but this one works flawlessly with a ton of options.
The greatest thing about this plugin is all you have to do is drop it into your plugins folder using an FTP client, activate it, then drag the widget into your sidebar under Presentation>Widgets. It works pretty well out of the box but most of you would probably make some changes to it.
- Change the Title
- Add a description to the widget
- Exclude users (I will probably exclude myself because there is no need to link to my homepage on my homepage)
- An option to automatically reset the list every so often
- Limit the number of names listed in the widget
- Limit the characters in the names listed
- Remarks for a blank list, so since I have it set up to reset every month I will write a sentence or two encouraging readers to comment.
- Filter specific URLs
- Whether or not to hyperlink the names
- Whether or not to show it only on the homepage or throughout your entire site
Overall the widget is great and I can’t really think of anything I would add to it. If you have a blog and were having problems with all the other top commentators plugins you should try this one out because it seems to work without a hitch.
I’ve installed this plugin on my blog and saw an almost immediate response from it. Seems people are more willing to comment when they feel they will get something back ie. a backlink. Feel free to stop by and say Hi.
Thanks for reviewing the top commentators widget. To be honest, there *was* a hitch on the plugin, whereby the widget was not end-tagged properly (i.e. no closing tag depending on how your blog stylize it). I’ve fixed it, so hopefully anyone who came by your site and tried this widget are aware of the update (v.0.999 as of date).
Cheers!