Blog Tag: Blog
Popular Posts Follow-up
After posting about Popular Posts, I must have been hit by some spider, or people are actually clicking the "unpopular posts" links in the sidebar (or in that entry). Yesterday I noticed that I only had 3 "unpopular posts" in that list. The problem was I was assuming an "unpopular post" would have been viewed less than 50 times. Silly me. I tweaked the query to always grab the 8 lowest items (in addition to all the other criteria) by removing the views < 50 clause.
Now my "unpopularity" is back up to an acceptable level.
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? :-)
Steadier Posting with Software
I mentioned back in January that one of the things I wanted to do to Improve this Blog was to post more regularly. I've noticed that I actually post in spurts. When I sit down to blog one thing I usually end up posting 2 or 3 entires. I do a blog-dump of what's been on my mind lately - one topic per entry.
To make things seem more regular - since I'm not (leave your one-liners in the comments... they practically write themselves) - I've added a "published_at" column to my database table, updated all the queries to check for published_at instead of created_at (if you find SQL errors around her lately, this is why), and edited my "add/edit entry" form to have a field for setting this value.
Of particular interest - and now we're off nerdism a little bit - I have the default published_at value for new entries set it self to: 'some time in the morning on the day after the most recent day I've published something'. For example, as I edit this particular entry, the published_at value is set for the morning of April 13th. I'll never tell when I actually wrote it! Mua-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
The upshot is: If I post entries in spurts, they will still come one a day. Maybe if I get enough future entries, I could change the logic to twice-a-day. It's a thought. Anyway - hopefully I'll stay ahead of the current day and there will always be something fresh around here.
Of course, if I really must post something today, then I can just change the published_at field when I make an entry. Blog software programmers, feel free to steal this idea, as it's probably not new.
Royalty
5 Comments | Latest by: Matt Gray | Add A Comment! »»
For those of you who have asked (Matt & Michelle), here's the inspiration, meaning, and where I lifted the graphic for the crown of Royalty. They have a troll cap too, which I have fortunately not had the need to use.
Blocker's Blog
3 Comments | Latest by: Phil | Add A Comment! »»
On the heels of "Improve the Blog" - wherein I wrote something about posting more frequently - has been a deafening silence. Why does that always happen to me?
Do I have nothing to say? Hell no.
Am I really busy? Very.
Am I plagued by the "blogger's block" which has crippled my writing since the divorce? Yeah, probably still to some degree (read: 99%).
Am I sick of all this shit stopping me from saying what I have to say? Rather.
I'm starting to think I'm not a blogger with block; I'm a blocker with a blog.
Lyric Idea? Matt?
