Adding Top Posts

As you can see from the Archives section of my blog, I have compiled about 109 posts over the past 4 months.

One thing I could make out from Google Analytics statistics is that the entry and exit posts were same for most of the visitors. i.e visitors rarely check the other posts in the blog, this is especially more observed from visitors coming from Search Engines. (This is termed as Bounce Rates in Google Analytics).

Google has been the major referrer to Online Diary and the early inclusion of the blog in Google Sitemaps has done wonders ! Tag Cloud was added some time back to help users in digging the posts easily via tags.

I was considering adding the top posts/most popular posts from quite some time, however I didn’t want to bloat the sidebar with lot of content. Currently I have created a separate page for Top Posts and you can find it here. I would definitely like to have this as a part of my homepage header (as in Problogger), probably I will take care of this while shifting to a 3 column wordpress theme 🙂 .

For those who are lazy to click on the Top Posts page, here is the list of Popular posts as of today 🙂

The Top Post content is delivered via Alex Kings Popularity Contest(PC) plugin and its pretty simple to configure and use. But I cannot completely agree that it really shows the top content of the site. The popularity rating of a post is calculated using various factors such as number of comments, trackbacks etc. Also if you are using the WordPress Cache plugin, the pages will be delivered via the cache and hence, the PC plugin will not consider those hits.Unfortunately I do use the WP Cache plugin and I have no intention of disabling it in the near time since I am constrained by my hosting speed.

If you don’t want a plugin calculating the popularity of the post, you should definitely consider using the Featured Posts Plugin. You can handpick your favorite posts and mark them as featured posts. Additionally, you can select an image for each feature and optionally add a small description.

P.S. The Top Post list was dynamically generated. I used the Exec-Php plugin which can be used to make php calls within static pages ! Do try it out 🙂