Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger

Recognizing your blog’s top commentators is a great way to recognize those readers who have spent their valuable time contributing something back to your site. It’s a win-win proposition, especially for newer blogs. You encourage some feedback and interaction among your readers, and in exchange they can get a free site-wide link from your blog. I started recognizing my top commentators Webgrrrl’s WordPress Widget back on July 15^th for just that reason.

I initially thought about setting up Webgggrl’s plugin to reset weekly or monthly, but as a relatively new blog (only 1 month old at the time), I felt that resetting the "Top Commentators" listed on the side of my blog to a big fat ZERO would probably actually discourage people from commenting rather than encouraging them. So I settled on keeping a running count of all comments.

Now that I’ve accumulated quite a few posts and comments, I have the opposite problem. Readers can also be discouraged from posting comments if they have to post 15 comments to get recognized as a top commentator!

Balancing Your Top Commentators Reset Period

Ever since I installed Webgrrrl’s widget, I’ve thought "Gee, it’d be nice if this plug-in would let me recognize the top commentators from the last __ days!". After a little more fiddling, I discovered that this plugin actually does exactly that.

All you have to do is type in the number of days in the box directly below the "Reset list every _____" list box. For some reason, I couldn’t click directly on that text box to enter a number. I had to click on the list box above it and then hit the Tab key to get my cursor in the "..specify number of days" field.

Starting today, I’ll be experimenting with a running reset period. I’m initially setting the period to 14 days, and I’ll adjust that based on how many people actually comment in the coming weeks.