As I’m working towards making my sites “stickier”, I’ve been looking around for a good plugin to show the post popular posts in the sidebar. I found an excellent plugin/widget combination that has been easy to use and has provided me with a lot of really interesting information.
The first piece to install is Alex King’s Popularity Contest plugin this sets up the table that holds the stats and will display the popularity ranking of each post below the content (unless you turn it off in the PHP, which I did). The plugin populates the table with number of views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and calculates a score for the post based on a weighted formula, which you can edit in the options. Being very analytical by nature, I especially like the reporting screen that shows all the stats for all of your posts. Lots of interesting information there.
The second piece, that makes it easy to display the most popular posts in the sidebar, is the JAW Popular Posts Widget . This one is pretty straightforward. You can specify the number of posts you want to display in the widget options.
Thanks for your comments on the previous post Dawud, Char, Phil, Dio, David and Jenny.
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I installed this plug in at Casual Keystrokes – I love all the data I can get in my WP-Admin just from the plug in.
I use a most commented plugin for something similar.
I know there are plugins that can rate posts by the amount of views but I prefer the ones that are generating some discussion.
Oh yeah, and I notice you’ve added a little thanks to those people who comment on your previous post. Nice work!
I like the most commented idea, in fact, I started out looking for a plugin like that for this blog, but this one actually lets you put more weight on whatever element you want to. If you want to highlight the posts that are generating the most comments, then jack up the weight in the formula for that element. In my monetized blogs I don’t get a lot of discussion, just pageviews and downloads, so I needed a way to show most popular based on other criteria.
The idea of thanking people for commenting on previous posts came from [somewhere]… I can’t remember where I saw that…
It’s a good one though- part of the reason I liked your blog from the start.
I’ve always wondered how people did this I’m off to give it a try now, thanks!
2 Sarakastic
I had the same situation before reading this post! ))
2 Randa
thx for the usefull information! ))
You’re welcome!! I’m so glad you found it to be useful and took the time to let me know.
I have been using this Sidebar wiget form Automattic but for some reason when I’m in the sidebar menu to put text or link widget there seems to be a Javascript error. Any of you guys have the same problem?
@ Cindy – no, I haven’t had that problem. You might check the WordPress support forums. I can usually find a solution to whatever’s ailing my blog there.
I suggest you add Latest Comments to your sidebar as well for some link love
BTW, make a search at google for “site:randaclay.com *** -view”
you have lots of supplemental pages. They are killing your traffic.
Think of supplemental pages as secondary server pages. Google does not let them show up in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) as long as it really needs them. The reason for this is either the page does not contain enough relevant information or it has duplicated content.
For example if you look at these pages:
http://www.randaclay.com/lumps/2006/09/29/advertisement/feed/
http://www.randaclay.com/lumps/2006/09/29/advertisement
they actually have the same content. You need to get rid of the feed page so that your main post does not look like a duplicate page for google.
This can also be said for archive pages since they show the post inside them as well.
Your first step should be installing the plugin at this page:
http://guff.szub.net/2005/09/01/head-meta-description/
it takes about first 25 words of a post and place it inside the meta description tag.
Let me know when you want the next step in SEO
Thanks for the tip about the meta tag plug in – I will check it out. I appreciate your input on the SEO stuff, because I really have a lot to learn where that’s concerned. You’re saying I need to get rid of the feed page, but I guess I don’t understand how to do that. I assume you don’t mean get rid of the feed.
I can’t thank you enough for telling me about the JAW popular posts widget. I was up all night trying to figure out how to use the Popularity Contest widget in my sidebar. Alex King was NOT very clear on how to put in a sidebar widget at all. Thanks so much for your help!!!!
[...] popular posts by calculating comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks. Wordpress users can go to RandaClay.com to figure out how to add your own. Thanks [...]
I’m so glad it was helpful!
Here is a good guide on how to get rid of feed pages using robots.txt in wordpress:
http://www.turkhitbox.com/wordpress-seo/best-robotstxt-for-wordpress.html
I think I prefer “Recent Posts” to Most popular. I mean, let’s say you got Dugg. Then that post would be right at the top, even if it was off-topic. I prefer readers to get the “thread” that I’m currently on.
@Jordan – I think having both in the sidebar is a good idea. The most popular plugin does allow you to decide how the “score” is assigned to posts, so if you don’t want traffic to be the main driver, it’s easy to give that a lower weight in the formula.
Thank you for sharing this topic with us Randa. It’s very useful to me. Now if I can just figure out a good plug-in for people that want to subscribe to my comments via e-mail. (One that jives with the latest version of WP) Thanks Again!!
Ok, where did you get the MyBlogLog profile pic widgedt!! LMAO!!
They’ve released an update to that plugin for subscribing to comments: http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/
Here’s the link to My Avatars plugin: http://www.napolux.com/?p=238
I’ve got everything in this post implemented.. I figured out where to add the zeros in the php – I’m just not sure where to change the posts that show from 1 to 5. I know it’s probably something simple that I missed somewhere in the php. I’ll just go back and read slower. Thanks!
Works like a charm on my blog. Thanx for the lead.
Thanks for the post. The plugins work well. One question though. I see that you don’t have King’s little popularity parenthetical at the bottom of each post. How do we rid ourselves of that?
@Peter – click on Edit next to the plugin on the Plugins page in the Admin panel, and near the top of the code you’ll see this section:
// Change this to “0″ below if you don’t want to show each post’s popularity with the post content
@define(’AKPC_SHOWPOP’, 0);
You can see I changed it to 0, and that causes it not to show up in each post. Hope that helps!
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