What you give with one hand you take away with another

If you are giving away all your Google Juice from your sidebar, then you get less juice for

• Your own pages
• The links to sites in your content
• The links from your comments

This isn’t just a problem with Top Commenters, it is also the same with blogrolls, and I have discussed that in the past as well.

There is some WordPress Logic you can use for all page elements depending on whether you are using widgets or not.

If you are using widgets, you would probably have to use a variant of the text entry box that allows PHP – I don’t monitor developments with WordPress widgets too much, but in the past I have found the way they are implemented in most themes to be too much hard work to customize where things appear, and on which pages. I don’t know of a version of widgets that allows drag-and-drop and total control over the placement of widgets on specific pages.

If you are using normal sidebar.php code, then you can use something like the following code.

There are a number of Top Commenters plugins, I have just grabbed the code insert from one example.

<?php if ( is_home() ) { ?>

< ?php
if(function_exists('fp_get_topcommenters')) {
echo fp_get_topcommenters();
}
?>

<?php } ?>

If you wanted the Top Commenters to appear on both your homepage and your single pages (the ones that permalinks point to), then you would use something like this:-

<?php if ( is_home() || is_single() ) { ?>
< ?php
if(function_exists('fp_get_topcommenters')) {
echo fp_get_topcommenters();
}
?>
<?php } ?>

There are lots of conditional flags that can be used within WordPress in this manner. Here are some others but it might not be an exhaustive list.

is_home()
is_paged()
is_search()
is_attachment()
is_single()
is_category()
is_author()
is_archive()
is_404()

There is also a function with Ultimate Tag Warrior, but you should ensure that UTW is installed in the same statement just in case you switch it off.

<?php if ( function_exists('is_tag') and is_tag() ) : ?>

Most themes already use similar code for various elements for the sidebar and in the headers.

Watch out for multiple occurrences of the logic in various files such as

sidebar.php
home.php
index.php
tags.php
single.php
page.php
archives.php

Some themes just include the sidebar.php on all pages. In this case you might have to use lots of nested logic to achieve the level of control you require.
Other themes only use sidebar.php on pages that use index.php, and have custom code for single.php – this allows you to use slightly less logic, but means you have to edit code in multiple places.

Do you worry about the danger of giving a 3rd party service control over the most important part of your blogging business – your subscribers?

Up until today there were only 2 realistic alternatives to retain some control over your RSS subscribers while using Feedburner for collecting stats.

• Redirect Plugins – Such as the Feedburner Redirect Plugin from Ordered List

– this isn’t a perfect solution because the autodiscovery seems to always resolve before the feed is actually added, which results in a proportion of your sunscribers still subscribed to the Feedburner URL

• Feedburner MyBrand – This is a “pro” feature of Feedburner, and allows you to have Feedburner feeds on a subdomain, such as feeds.yourdomain.com

– this is also not perfect, because that is a subdomain – I haven’t seen a site do anything to create an additional redirect to the subdomain to truly keep it on the same domain, but I am sure something should be possible – it also isn’t free – great for profitable blogs, not so great for lots of niche sites

Now there is an alternative, and it is pretty damn smart…

Feedburner Feeds Stats Hack

Mark has come up with an ingenious little hack to use Feedburner stats on his own feeds with a small patch to one of the WordPress core files.

I haven’t personally tested it yet, but I think Mark shows sufficient proof that it does work.

I am not sure how this works with click tracking, feed flares etc, or the best way to use this for email subscriptions. Also the feedburner feed is still there, and that is desirable for anyone migrating from one method to another. On a fresh site maybe you could make the Feedburner feed private so that you are the only one that accesses it.
You would also have to make sure that Feedburner is fetching a feed that is different to the one that is provided to your subscribers, otherwise you end up with a closed loop.

One major benefit of using Feedburner is that their uptime is very impressive, and they are using their bandwidth to serve your RSS. For many publishers that is quite a significant bandwidth saving.

Hopefully Mark will turn this into a plugin to make it easier to use, especially with the more frequent updates to WordPress these days