Boredworkers.com

Ever wanted to know how popular one of your posts is to your readership? I’ll be the first to admit that I was and still am curious about it. Granted that there are statcounters out there that will give you in depth information about your site’s visitors. However, these counters rarely (if ever) keep track of the popularity of each and every single one of your posts. And so I scratched around looking for a Wordpress plugin that would do exactly that. Guess what, I’ve found it.

I’ve just installed Alex King’s Popularity Contest plugin for Wordpress and switched it on. Basically, the plugin tracks and calculates popularity based on Permalink views, Home views, Archive views, Category views, Feed (RSS) views, Comments, Pingbacks, and Trackbacks. Each and every one of these can be assigned a popularity rating weight, which will be taken into account when calculating the popularity rating of a post. For example, Permalink views can be assigned 10 points, and Comments 20 points, and so on so forth. If a post has 10 permalink views and 5 comments, it will have a total of 200 points. Match that against the total points of all your posts and you get an idea in terms of percentage of which posts are the most popular.

Since the initial popularity is counted based on comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks, it is obvious that the initial statistics is going to be biased towards posts that have the greatest number of comments. Posts that have no comments will just drop off the radar. However, worry not as your readership starts pouring in, the stats will be tracked and you’ll soon see the statistics starting to better represent your site’s overall popularity. I’m already seeing some of the older posts that still draw attention starting to catch up. Slowly but surely, the statistics will stabilise and then you’ll begin to see which posts are still popular even though its been months since you’ve posted or thought about it.

The plugin comes with a comprehensive summary report on the statistics that are being tracked. A single report that gives you an overview of your entire site. In some ways, the post popularity statistics will give you a general idea of what your visitors are looking for, which may in turn aid you with your site’s content. True that it doesn’t really matter if you’re hosting a personal weblog, but if your site’s a commercial one powered by wordpress, such information will greatly help you to target your content better.

Additionally, you can also add code to your Wordpress theme template to display the popularity of each post (enabled by default) as well as additional information in the sidebar using various access points and functions that are provided by the plugin. A very useful plugin indeed. And not a trivial one, I might add (it is 1678 lines long!).

So, whether you’re just being vain or you want something to help you better understand what your readers want, this plugin might just do the trick. Go on, try it out, and give yourself an ego trip :)

Note:
You’ll need to have a user access level of 10 to see the Options configuration, although it is still accessible via the plugins description. A minor bug in the description but easily remedied. Popularity report is available to everyone.