Bloggers Festival Guru

Top Commentators Widget For Blogger

You might have noticed the Top commentators widget in blogs powered by Wordpress. Sometimes, it is referred to as Best commentators widget. This post attempts to provide the same top commentators/ best commentators widget for Blogger/ Blogspot.

When I did search for the top commentators widget for Blogger, I could get very little on the net. I found one useful resource that seemed to implement the top commentators widget for Blogger. But, unfortunately, it is written in a foreign language; I believe it is in Russian language. Here is the blog, in case, you are interested: Best Commentators Widget for Blogger.

For those who do not understand Russian language, here is the step-by-step tutorial.  To implement this, you will need a Yahoo account as we are going to use Yahoo! Pipes for implementing the widget. So, if you do not have an account with Yahoo, go to Yahoo and create an account first before reading further.

1. Go to Yahoo! Pipes home page by clicking here: Yahoo! Pipes
2. Click on the "Sign In" link at the top right corner of the page
3. Login with your Yahoo user id and password.
4. Go to my Yahoo! Pipe "Top Commentators Widget for Blogger" by clicking here: Top Commentators Pipe
   
   
   
   
5. Once you are on the Top Commentators Pipe page, click on the "Clone" link to make a copy for your blog.
6. Once a copy is made, you will see the link "Edit Source". Click this.
   
   
   
   
7. It will open the Pipes flow diagram for editing. At the top of the diagram, you will see a module called "Fetch Feed".
   
   
   
   
8. You will change the feed to point to your blog. In the URL box in the "Fetch Feed" module, delete my blog's feed and type the following: http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=1000. The "yourblog.blogspot.com" has to be replaced by your blog's URL.
9. Once you have typed the address as shown above, click on the "Save" button at the top right.
10. Click on the "Run Pipe ..." button at the top middle. This will open another window with the results of your pipe. If you have done everything right, it should display the list of your commentators with the number of comments in brackets.
11. Click on the "More Options" button. This will open a drop-down list; click on the "Get as RSS" option.
    
     
    
    
12. This will open your feed for the top commentators list. Copy the feed address from the browser's address field. This should look some thing like this:  http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=1324dbad8c99bdc922ba75fee8dab73c&_render=rss
13. Now, login to your Blogger account.
14. Create a feed widget with the feed url you have just copied in step 12. If you are not sure how to create a feed widget, read my post on Recent Posts Widget for Blogger. You just have to follow the same steps as noted in that post. For the feed url, just use the one you have copied from the browser in step 12 here.
15. Name the widget as "Top Commentators".

That's it. You have created the Top Commentators/ Best Commentators widget for Blogger. Unfortunately, at this stage, this does not provide any search engine gains to your commentator. The name is only linked to the latest comment by him/ her. As of now, use this feature. Soon, we will have a better widget that would give the link to the commentators's home page.

I know that this is a bit technical and you may encounter some problems along the way. Feel free to shoot your questions here. I will respond to them as quickly as possible. Please subscribe to my feed if you like this post.