With a whole bunch of things on my plate on Monday, it slipped my mind to keep an eye on the top commentators list for the month of June. I usually make sure that I’m around to see who is topping the list when the clock strikes midnight, but that simply did not happen on Monday night. Thankfully, I was able to use the cache function in Google the next morning to at least grab a snapshot of what the blog looked like on June 30.
The cache was displaying Beyond the Rhetoric as of the morning of the 30th, so it was just a matter of logging into the WordPress Dashboard and looking into any new comments that were posted on that day. It’s a good thing that I took this extra step, because it did affect how the overall rankings panned themselves out. As you can probably imagine, the list of top commentators for June 2008 contains a lot of familiar faces.
Who Are the Top Commentators for June 2008?
Sitting atop the list yet again is Jorge. He was sitting in second place for a while there, but with a huge surge on the very last day, Jorge trudged ahead to grab the number one spot with a total of 41 comments. That’s nearly twice as many as he posted in May and four times as many as April! To top it all off, Jorge still manages to find time to find amazing and funny videos.
Coming in at number two is Nick, the same guy that won the Market Leverage contest from John Chow. The RomanDock.com blogger posted 38 comments in the month of June. Who’s the man behind the blog? Nick comes forward with 8 random facts about him, just so that you can get to know him better. Did you know that he is a Rubik’s Cube pro?
Betshopboy nabs the third spot for June with 17 comments. It seems that he is a huge soccer (football) nut and was following the Euro 2008 tournament religiously. Along the way, Betshopboy posted some nice articles covering the beautiful game, including one that applauded the Spaniards. Viva La Espana!
Well, it’s not completely true that Betshopboy has third place all to himself, because Paulette also had 17 comments. I guess you could say that they tied, but because of the alphabetical arrangement of the top commentators list, it appeared that Paulette was fourth. Maybe to celebrate another appearance on a top commentators list, she should do a little dance to Hard Candy by Madonna.
Sneaking into the fifth and final spot for June 2008 was Derek Semmler. The guy with the killer commute still managed to put up 16 comments on this blog last month. If you want to know how to add an AdSense block above your first post, you’ll want to hop on over to the recent tutorial posted on Derek’s blog.
Thanks again to everyone who contributes to this blog. Without the commentators, I’d be screaming into a vacuum. Here’s to a healthy and fruitful July!
Thanks for the plug. This is becoming a good habit. 🙂
Paulette isn’t fourth, we are joint-third, I love happy endings.
It’s quite apparent that your monthly Top commentators post has created healthy “competition” among readers and also increase the number of comments (and pageviews) to your articles.
Thanks for the plug!
Thanks for the shoutout! It’s always great to be recognized. Plus, it’s fun to create some conversation and post a few jabs about you on your own site from time to time!
As far as recalling the top commentators list when you don’t watch the list at midnight, check out this post from Derek that makes that real easy. I use a bit of a modified version myself:
SELECT comment_author, comment_author_url, COUNT( comment_id ) AS comment_count FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_date LIKE ‘2008-06%’ AND comment_type NOT LIKE ‘pingback’ GROUP BY comment_author ORDER BY comment_count DESC
so that it doesn’t show trackbacks and provides the comment author’s url for quick access.
Glad to have made the list this month, I faded there towards the end but still squeaked in for the last spot.
As Nick mentioned, I provided a query that you can use to retrieve your comment count from any month. As a matter of fact, I too have added the comment_author_url but I have not excluded the pingbacks.
Your method using the Google cache works as well, although it might be a little more time consuming since you added in comments from the point of the cache.
Alternatively, I can just be around when the count resets. 🙂
Hey, if you want to be a slave to the clock that is entirely up to you. 😉
Thanks for the mention:) More power to you!