Top Commentator Widget for Blogger with Backlinks

Friday, May 23, 2008 by Gaurav | Filed Under : Blogger, Hacks, Tips and Tricks

So here we are. This is to honor all those commenters of blog who review your blog and give their precious comments. So if you want to display the top most commenters of your blog along with their comment count this is a widget just for you. We have many plugins to do this in WordPress but when it comes to Blogger we didn't have many except a couple.

So the earlier Top Commenters widgets were by AssessmyBlog which was modified by Amanda in her Top Commenter's Widget Post. Now a problem notified by Amanda about the Link shown by the widget linked to the most recent comment by the commenter and not the Site Url of the Commenter. So this was rectified by me and the following Widget was made.
Thanks to Amanda for this small but beautiful Widget customization script. So the Usage part of the widget is very simple.

Enter the name of your Blog without the "http://" part. The URL would be like yourblog.blogspot.com for the blogspot users and www.yourdomain.com for the custom domain users. So Enter the URL in the Blog URL field.
Key in the name that you wish to exclude from the commenters list, This is your name and type it in Filter Your Name field.
Lastly type in how many top commenters you would like to feature in the Widget. This is by default set to 5

The widget makes its calculations on last 100 comments posted in your blog. The Widget is purely based on Yahoo Pipes and the Original Pipe can be viewed here:Top Commenters Widget for Blogger with Commenter Backlinks. So you can view the source here, make a clone of the pipe and customize it your way.If there is a room for improvement do notify me and if possible give the due credits.
I have notified Amanda of the Improvements and possibly she would implement in into her widget very soon.
So that was my first real widget, Notify of any bug if there.

Also DO check out the WordPress styled Recent Comments Widget For Blogger