Get Your Name and Site Listed Here

To celebrate reaching a major milestone in terms of pagerank (now a PR5 homepage) feed subscribers (we nudged the 100 subscribers mark this week), we are going to share some link luurv with you. Check out the new Top Commentators widget in the right-hand menu, this comes courtesy of the good folks at PFAdvice.com, who have made a neat little script available (less than a 2kb download), that allows bloggers to display text links to the lifeblood of their blog – the people who visit and comment the most, this could be YOU.

The Show Top Commentators is a cinch to install, just FTP* a single file into your Wordpress plugins directory, activate in the Plugins page in the admin area, and paste a snippet of code into your sidebar (or create a Samsarin php-enabled widget) and paste it into that. You may have to tweak the ul and li tags and the inbuilt h2 to get everything laying out as you would like it, but that is easy to do also. I had to remove the li tags from the code you are told to paste into the sidebar, but your blog may have different requirements.

Options and settings are done from within the plugin php file itself rather than through an admin tab, but again, that is relatively easy to do, just remember to chmod your permissions on the plugin file to allow you to edit from the WP plugin editor page.

The top commentators on Sciencetext.com are showing right now, you will notice the displayed names go straight to that person’s website or blog, and there is no “nofollow” tag, which means they get the link luurv we promised. At the moment, the top people have only a couple of comments each, it would be great to get this section of the site more active, so please chip in with any comments on as many of the articles here as you like and get your name in our commentary box.

You may have noticed that some of the names in the commentary box, are not associated with a site, well those are commentators who did not fill in the website field in the comments form, be sure you don’t make the same mistake when you comment, otherwise we cannot share any of that lovely link luurv.

*FTP is so old hat (as opposed to black hat) when it comes to installing plugins, I saw a much slicker method available via, you guessed it, another plugin, that allows you to install plugins directly from your admin page. It was featured on weblogtoolscollection about a year ago, but is as invaluable as ever. The WP Plugin Installer plugin also allows you to install themes, and perhaps with some minor hacks could be used for other uploads too. Tell me about your mileage with it (another chance for you to get into our Top Commentary box).