{"id":855,"date":"2008-11-03T16:25:12","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T08:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/?p=855"},"modified":"2008-11-03T16:25:12","modified_gmt":"2008-11-03T08:25:12","slug":"popular-post-widget-for-wordpress-websites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/popular-post-widget-for-wordpress-websites.html","title":{"rendered":"Popular Post Widget for WordPress Websites"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been looking around for a widget that will display for example the top ten most popular posts in a WordPress websites blog. The only widget I found was the &#8220;Popularity Contest&#8221; widget in the WordPress.org website. Unfortunately many users complained about it being buggy, not working with fatal error or not reporting posts that are actually popularly visited by visitors. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The way it calculates post popularity is rather complicated; it keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. Then it assigns a numerical score and determines which posts are the most popular and list them down accordingly.<\/p>\n<p>I think the problem with this is that it does not use any analytics to find out which posts were having good hits from the internet. An alternate solution would be to do it manually by using say Google Analytics or other analytic software and look at the pages that are listed as the top content pages visited by visitors. This may not be the best option as it is not automatic, but until a good working popular post widget has been crafted, this seems to be the best way so far to show your best post to visitors visiting your WordPress websites blog.<\/p>\n<p>Doing it manually has one drawback, in that you will need to check your analytics every once in awhile to update which are your top content posts in your WordPress websites and manually update the list accordingly. With the new WordPress versions from 2.5.x upwards, the new widget features is very convenient to use, and it works even for WordPress themes that are not optimized for widgetizing.<\/p>\n<p>The way to go about listing your top popular content list require some HTML know how on your side.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Goto the Widgets section in your WordPress &#8220;Design&#8221; tab\n<li>Add the &#8220;Text&#8221; to your sidebar\n<li>Edit your &#8220;Text&#8221; by clicking edit, the widget will expand to show blank space for keying in your text. There are two blank space, the top one is for writing your title header for your widget, it will show up on your WordPress websites sidebar as header title. The bigger blank space is where you will key in your HTML to manually list down your popular pages.\n<li>Proceed to key in one by one the popular posts that is listed in your analytics. For those who don&#8217;t know, the HTML codes as follows:\n<ul>\n<li>&lt;a href=&#8221;http:\/\/yourdomain.com\/your_post_url.html&#8221;&gt;You Post Title&lt;\/a &gt;\n<\/ul>\n<li>After you have done, click the &#8220;Change&#8221; button to shrink the box\n<li>Very important! Click the &#8220;Save Changes&#8221; button at the bottom of the widget list to save your changes permanently\n<\/ol>\n<p>That&#8217;s it! Check your handiwork by visiting your site and see your popular post list. You may want to readjust the position of the popular post box by going back to the widget list and drag it around the sidebar.<\/p>\n<p><center><br \/>\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"><!--\ngoogle_ad_client = \"pub-5685769204706262\";\ngoogle_alternate_color = \"eeeecc\";\ngoogle_ad_width = 336;\ngoogle_ad_height = 280;\ngoogle_ad_format = \"336x280_as\";\ngoogle_ad_type = \"text\";\n\/\/2007-08-06: JanLeow.com Blogs (Content)\ngoogle_ad_channel = \"5832813811\";\ngoogle_color_border = \"FFFFFF\";\ngoogle_color_bg = \"FFFFFF\";\ngoogle_color_link = \"CC0000\";\ngoogle_color_text = \"000000\";\ngoogle_color_url = \"808080\";\ngoogle_ui_features = \"rc:0\";\n\/\/--><\/script><br \/>\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"\n  src=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/show_ads.js\">\n<\/script><br \/>\n<\/center><br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been looking around for a widget that will display for example the top ten most popular posts in a WordPress websites blog. The only widget I found was the &#8220;Popularity Contest&#8221; widget in the WordPress.org website. Unfortunately many users complained about it being buggy, not working with fatal error or not reporting posts that &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/popular-post-widget-for-wordpress-websites.html\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Popular Post Widget for WordPress Websites<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[12],"tags":[160,162,165],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1bS5F-dN","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":734,"url":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/make-your-own-wordpress-website.html","url_meta":{"origin":855,"position":0},"title":"Make your websites using WordPress","author":"Jan","date":"13 August 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Wordpress by far is the most popular software used for blogging. Almost every self-hosted website that was build for blogging uses Wordpress. It sheer versatility, ease of use, numerous themes and plugins available make it the choice script to install. In addition, if you decided to turn your Wordpress blog\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Website&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Website","link":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/category\/website"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1129,"url":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/sudden-drop-in-website-traffic.html","url_meta":{"origin":855,"position":1},"title":"Sudden drop in website traffic","author":"Jan","date":"10 August 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"This is really strange. Perhaps I've not been blogging for awhile, but to find the website traffic dropped suddenly is certainly disconcerting. Sure this website is mostly a blogging website in nature. It's always nice to see lots of traffic despite the high bounce rate. Never expected the traffic to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Website&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Website","link":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/category\/website"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":997,"url":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/make-your-own-web-site-browser-troubleshooting.html","url_meta":{"origin":855,"position":2},"title":"Make your own web site browser troubleshooting","author":"Jan","date":"14 February 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Sometimes different browsers react differently to the HTML\/CSS when you make your own web site, you have to watch out and test it on each browser. Kind of a drag if you want to make sure IE\/Firefox\/Opera\/Chrome works flawlessly. If that is too much of a chore, then just concentrate\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Website&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Website","link":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/category\/website"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1690,"url":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/google-multiple-sign-in.html","url_meta":{"origin":855,"position":3},"title":"Google Multiple Sign In","author":"Jan","date":"9 August 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Google multiple sign in is another very useful feature launched by Google recently. Certainly helps if you have multiple Gmail account. And why would you have so many Gmail \/ Google account in the first place? Many like me I found has a Gmail account for personal, for work, or\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Computer Devices&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Computer Devices","link":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/category\/computer-devices"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1440,"url":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/facebook.html","url_meta":{"origin":855,"position":4},"title":"Facebook","author":"Jan","date":"1 November 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Facebook is one of the most popular social networking website around. Having tried a number of social websites, I could say this is the best amongst them. Facebook is still not perfect, and there are some settings that are hard to find and configure. However when you compare with the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Website&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Website","link":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/category\/website"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3103,"url":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/domain-name-with-without-www-prefix.html","url_meta":{"origin":855,"position":5},"title":"To use or not to use WWW before your domain name","author":"Jan","date":"18 August 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"It seems the www. prefix to your domain name is actually a subdomain. When internet first started, and website were being created, www prefix would refer to a website as being a World Wide Web, probably trying to differentiate from the intranet website I suppose. However, due to frequent usage,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Website&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Website","link":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/category\/website"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}