Installing too many plugins will make the wordpress blog work slowly and unstable, use code built in your theme will reduce the system resources.

I've known a ton of plugins and widgets that allows me to list recent comments and recent post on my WordPress blog but I'm not using it. Because I've integrated some useful code below then I get results similar to those extensions which I've known.

List most recent comments

<?php
  global $wpdb;
  $sql = "SELECT DISTINCT ID, post_title, post_password, comment_ID, comment_post_ID, comment_author, comment_date_gmt, comment_approved, comment_type,comment_author_url, SUBSTRING(comment_content,1,30) AS com_excerpt FROM $wpdb->comments LEFT OUTER JOIN $wpdb->posts ON ($wpdb->comments.comment_post_ID = $wpdb->posts.ID) WHERE comment_approved = '1' AND comment_type = '' AND post_password = '' ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC LIMIT 10";

  $comments = $wpdb->get_results($sql);
  $output = $pre_HTML;
  $output .= "\n<ul>";
  foreach ($comments as $comment) {
    $output .= "\n<li>".strip_tags($comment->comment_author) .":" . "<a href=\"" . get_permalink($comment->ID)."#comment-" . $comment->comment_ID . "\" title=\"on ".$comment->post_title . "\">" . strip_tags($comment->com_excerpt)."</a></li>";
  }
  $output .= "\n</ul>";
  $output .= $post_HTML;
  echo $output;
?>

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