Top Commentators

It's been one month since I added the top commentators links to the sidebar, and it clearly impacted the number of comments on this blog. Despite my less-than-prolific output lately (only 3 posts in the month of March), there were 3 times as many comments in the past month as in any previous month.

There's no doubt in my mind that the top commentators contributed to the increase. Why?

• 14 visitors found this blog via a search for the phrase "top commentators", about half of these immediately left one or more comments.
• 6 visitors left multiple comments in quick succession (usually exactly the number needed to get a link in the sidebar)

So if you want to increase the number of comments on your own blog, adding links to the top commentators is definitely worthwhile. If you're more interested in rewarding your existing audience and don't want folks commenting just for the links, I suggest titling your links with something other than "top commentators" and don't mention that phrase anywhere on your site - that way link hunters won't find you on Google.

Regardless of motivation, most of the comments were at least topical and showed that the commenter had read the post, so I don't mind if they were driven by the desire for a free PR5 link. Especially given my lackluster posting schedule last month - at least someone was adding new content here ; )

I want to point out a few new features added to this blog in the past few days.

Link Blog

The first is the addition of a link blog. I track hundreds of feeds everyday, so of course I see a lot of great posts that I never get a chance to blog about. From now on, the best of these posts will go into the link blog. You can see the most recent additions in the sidebar under the heading "Great Posts Elsewhere". Clicking the "more" link under those posts will take you to an archive of all links (I just started this, so there's no much in the archive yet). There's also a feed available if anyone's interested.

Notice I didn't go the usual route of creating a shared feed through Google Reader, although that's certainly the easiest way to create a link blog. Google Reader is great, but I prefer to use an offline reader. Also, if I used Google's javascript widget to publish those links here, it wouldn't pass any link love. I'm only linking to posts that really deserve the attention, so I want those links to be visible to both users and search engines.

Top Commentators

The second addition is the "top commentators" block, which rewards those who've commented here in the past 30 days. Right now it lists the top 6 contributors. Wordpress users can accomplish this easily with a plugin, but this blog is powered by Drupal, which has no such plugin. Still, I was able to implement something similar with a bit of PHP. If you're blogging with Drupal and want to add this, here's the code I'm using in that block:

1. <?php
2. $users = db_query("SELECT COUNT(cid) AS count, mail, name, homepage FROM {comments} WHERE uid != 1 And timestamp > (unix_timestamp(now()) - 3600*24*30) GROUP BY mail ORDER BY count DESC LIMIT 6");
3. print "<ul>";
4. while ($user = db_fetch_object($users)) {
5. print "<li>".l($user->name,"$user->homepage")." ($user->count)</li>";
6. }
7. print "</ul>";
8. ?>

Note that this assumes your comments are from anonymous users (without an account on your drupal installation). If you have a mix of anonymous and registered users (other than yourself) you'll need to do some tweaking to make it work.