Popular Posts
A while back I added entry counts to the blog entries (damn, has it been that long?). When an entry is visited directly at it's own url, I crank up the count by 1. The visit to the entry has to be on this site, not via RSS. I don't add to the count when an entry is viewed in the main page or in monthly archives; only at it's own link. I thought that would be the most significant way of counting. It would count people going directly to specific entries from Google or linking directly to entries from other sites (one can hope...)
There is no catch for "unique visits" or "visits in a session" - I didn't want to think about it that much. I'm not selling ads with this metric or doing anything important with it. I just wanted to see which entries people are looking at.
With this information I have made 2 new queries, one for popular posts and one for unpopular posts, and I'm displaying the results in the side bar. Check out the popular ones and see what all the fuss is about. Check out the unpopular ones and give them some love, too ;-)
The popular posts simply grabs from the top of the stack and shows the 8 entries with the most views. The unpopular posts is a little different. It grabs from the bottom, but the views have to be greater than 0 and the published_at date has to be less than now (since I implemented post dated entries, those would have the least views). Also, I make offset by the number on the home page to skip all the recent stuff. I really want to highlight old stuff that people may have missed
I should really work up a way to display the middle 8 or so "mediocre" entries. Anyway - at the time I write this, here are the popular and unpopular posts:
Popular Posts
- Michal Training for LLS Ride (2271)
- Comment Spam Measures (1734)
- Trackback Test Entry (635)
- Implemented Trackback (625)
- Making Wrong Code Look Wrong (576)
- Seinfeld's Apartment (401)
- Outbound Link Warnings with YUL (399)
- Mentioned On Gen-X Design (372)
Unpopular Posts
- Wimpy SUV Drivers (32)
- Happy Birthday, Madelynn! (33)
- I'll Be Twenty Nine Soon! (33)
- Application Scope for PHP (34)
- Go Bleep Yourself (35)
- Japanese Pop Culture Is Weird (36)
- Good Ad Placement (37)
- New Mash-Up (41)
Actually now that I think about it, I could do one of those "popular posts this week" entries - with a cron job even. Is that cheating? :-)
Trackback: http://philsown.org/2007/04/popular-posts/trackback
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