Adding conversations to my blog's homepage

Thanks to a little hacking of Movable Type, I’ve added three new features to the right-hand column on the home page. You can now see:

• Last five trackbacks. While those looking at individual threads will see which other sites have linked to me, this seemed a better way to highlight that there may be a conversation forming outside of this blog that’s related to something I wrote.


• Last five comments. Comments are a bit hard to see (they require additional clicks, and not everyone does that), so now you can see the last five things others have said, with links to the full threads to see the entire conversation. This is especially useful when there are threads that get some attention (thanks to Google) that may be old, and you wouldn’t know there was a conversation going on unless it was highlighted on the home page.

• Most frequent commenters. This is one way to acknowledge and thank the people who are contributing the most content to this site other than me. And it might give you an idea of who’s hanging out here.

Other suggestions? Does this enhance your use of this site? It seemed interesting to me (which is why I added it), but I’m genuinely interested in hearing whether you find it useful as well.