Recent Site Changes (Improvements?)
In case you didn’t know, I love reading your comments. In fact, I love it so much that I’ve had a leader board over there in the right sidebar for quite some time. And until just recently, FMF of FreeMoneyFinance.com had a stranglehold on the all time lead. However, I just noticed that Blaine Moore of RunToWin.com and TheFirstTimeHomeowner.com has slowly but steadily crept into the lead.
Are you listening FMF? You’re no longer large and in charge… 
The purpose of the leader board has been to give some recognition to those of you that are active members of the FCN community, and to give you a link back if you leave a URL when you comment. However, in looking at the leader board, I noticed that several of the people on the list haven’t been very active members of the FCN community in recent months. Thus, I decided to shake things up a bit in hopes of sharing the love with some of my newer readers. So… If you’ll look over in the right sidebar, you’ll now see a list of “Big talkers” from the past 30 days.
As an aside, I’ve also modified the right sidebar to improve usability. This has involved removing some of the advertising, adding in a “Recent articles” section, and modifying the “Recent comments” section such that it now includes a snippet of each comment rather than just the title of the associated post. This is the way it used to be, but the old plugin caused some glitches with the overall site layout.
Please let me know what you think about the changes. I’m all about usability. 
Updated to add: I just recently changed to a different comment spam filter. If you make a comment and it doesn’t get through, please contact me so I can try to rescue your comment and train the filter.
Oh, and special thanks to Nate and Jeffrey of SavingAdvice.com and PFAdvice.com for modifying their commenter plugin to allow for comments to be tabulated based on a running window of arbitrary length.
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The FCN community… I love it!
I’ve actually become quite addicted to reading the parenting blog. Good stuff.
NCN
Comment by NCN — Feb 11th 2007 @ 12:49 amI want to be large and in charge
Comment by Jeremy — Feb 11th 2007 @ 1:01 amI’m on the list! Of course I’m tied with half the list.
Comment by Clever Dude — Feb 11th 2007 @ 1:39 amGlad we were able to help out and a nice suggestion. I’m sure that others will like to utilize the modification you requested. Let us know if any issues come up with it.
Comment by Saving Advice — Feb 11th 2007 @ 2:48 amSparking a competition to fire up some traffic huh? Nice idea…
Comment by The Financial Ladder — Feb 11th 2007 @ 6:13 amFMF first fell from 1st to 2nd, then entirely off the list. I love it! Down with FMF! hahaha
Comment by jim — Feb 11th 2007 @ 7:40 amI’m #3! But then, I’ve always ranked remarkably high for someone who isn’t even a PF blogger.
The “comments in 30 days” notion also seems a more accurate reflector of who’s actively participating. Some of the old honorees seemed to be folks who just obsessively went through the archive of posts, commenting everywhere, and then disappeared again.
It still amazes me that I can rank so high, commenting so relatively little.
Comment by Matt — Feb 12th 2007 @ 2:53 amWow. Make that #2, pushing ahead of Jim. If I had another comment to offer after this one, I’d even beat out Blaine Moore for the top spot. Wow!
Comment by Matt — Feb 12th 2007 @ 2:55 amSince you’re listing “big talkers”, I think Jim needs to be locked in at #1. Seems right, doesn’t it?
Comment by FMF — Feb 12th 2007 @ 7:45 amI actually forgot about the sidebar bit. What were the numbers for FMF and myself when I passed him by? And does it really matter?
I will have to check out the new version of the plugin. I have a version that I modified to not be able to mess up my theme with comment snippets at RTW but I have never looked to see if the original had been updated.
I think I will give the site a few days to make sure everything is working first, though. I just updated to wp2.1 and changed hosting providors; at home this morning I was still waiting for DNS to propogate.
Comment by Blaine Moore — Feb 12th 2007 @ 8:30 amAnd, yes, I am listening.
Comment by FMF — Feb 12th 2007 @ 9:13 amBlaine, I think it was something like 248 to 246.
Matt: I pulled ahead!
FMF: I am a big talker, whatcha gonna do about it?
Comment by jim — Feb 12th 2007 @ 6:24 pmOh Matt, you’re #2 on BFP
Comment by jim — Feb 12th 2007 @ 6:24 pmThanks, Nickel. I think that that just says that I have spent too much time at your sight over the last year or two…
I was hoping that it would update the link to the current oldest from the past month, but I guess not. Oh well!
I do notice that your link to the commenter plugin itself is broken, by the way. You forgot to add the http at the start, so it winds up redirecting people to your front page rather than to the pfadvice.com page.
Comment by Blaine Moore — Feb 12th 2007 @ 8:44 pm