Geek On The Mountain

I installed Alex King’s Popularity Contest yesterday afternoon and it’s really cool. It’s a WP plugin that generates a popularity score for each post. The scores then get displayed as a percentage of the highest scoring post (so the most popular post always has a score of 100% and the other posts show the percentage of that as their score).

If you stopped by yesterday afternoon or evening you may have noticed that there wasn’t a whole lot displayed before an error hit.. Unfortunetly , when I first installed the plugin, this is what it did. Of course, I knew it did this, and was playing with it just before I went to work. I thought I’d deactivated the plugin so that the site would work again, but I didn’t….whoops. I got it taken care of early this morning. I had to remove my quotes at the top of the page for the time being. I don’t know exactly why, but when I connect to my quotes database and get a random quote, it closes the eonnection to the WP database. Or something. Basically, the error it was giving was that it couldn’t find the table for the Popularity Contest data, but it was looking in the quotes database and not the WP database (where it is actually located). I’m not really sure why it works this way…. I don’t know enough about mysql access through PHP to say for sure. I’ll get it to work eventually though, even if I hadve to manually re-open the connection to the WP database after I load the quote. Of course, since most people don’t just open up databases like this, this shouldn’t generally be an issue.

I saw this plugin a while ago. I had wanted the functionality, but I figured I’d setup something up for myself based on the number of visits each page gets, which would be fairly simple to do. Of course I never got around to doing it, and when I saw yesterday that Popularity Contest had won some sort of award I thought I’d give it a go. It’s much more than I thought it would be. Not only does it score based on permalink views and comments, but it also takes into account homepage views, category views, feed views, and trackbacks (I’m sure I left a couple of things out). Then, it has some nice reports that shows you the most popular category, the most popular item in each category, averages by category and by month, and more. In a few days, I’ll stick something in the sidebar showing the most popular posts. For now, the most popular posts are just the ones with the most comments. Some of them actually get a lot of traffic and some of them don’t. After a while, as it records visits to various pages, The comments won’t weigh so heavy in the calculation (most posts have a score of 0 right now because they have no comments and new views yet). This also explains why the percentages may look a little high on the posts you see on the homepage just now. They’re getting exposure that the other 500 posts haven’t gotten (at least not while we were counting). I should mention as well that you can adjust the score that is assigned for each type of view to better fit your needs. I just don’t feel like lowering the comment score and then raising (or rather, forgetting to) it later. It should start to even out after a few days at least.