Popularity Contest Plugin (beta)

normgregory – blog sabermetrics. ??

Arlo – yes, if you have a lot of requests for your feeds – home/archive/category views are similarly effected. These things even out over time. Remember, the values are configurable.

newy – I see it too, thanks. I imagine there is an admin check I need to use to not process views in the admin interface.

Rhyndman – If you don’t get many external pingbacks, a work-around might be to lower the value of pingbacks. I don’t plan to add a “self” check, as it could be a little tricky.

Alex -with feed already at “1”, how else can it be configured not to make such a large impact? I assume “0” would kill all feeds being factored in, but I do want them recognized to some extent (just not weighted so heavily). Would I have to raise all the other rankings?

Sure – remember, the actual numbers for each post are meaningless – you can set a trackback worth 500 if you want them to be weighted as such.

Gotcha. The odd thing is, all of my top posts have the identical number in feed/cat/archive. That doesn’t seem to make sense to me..maybe I’m not fully understanding how the plugin works.

Rhyndman – If you don’t get many external pingbacks, a work-around might be to lower the value of pingbacks. I don’t plan to add a “self” check, as it could be a little tricky.

To use relative links might help. At least it doesn?′t show up as a pingback in the comments. Therefore it probably is not counted as a PB.

Arlo – I sorry, I don’t understand the confusion. Views are counted per post, if you just activated it all posts on the home page/feed/etc. would *have* to have the same values for those views – right?

The plugin has been active for about 3 days now, and the top 6 posts register the exact same numbers. For example, my current top 6 posts read like this (the ‘post’ count seems realistic, I left that out):

Title Cat Arch Feed
Foo 2748 35 5648
Bar 2748 35 5648
Car 2748 35 5648 etc..

I guess I’m confused how all 6 posts could have the identical number of views in all three categories.

I’d be confused if they weren’t identical…

Yes, each entry in your feed or on your home page is going to get a counter every time the feed is accessed or the home page is viewed. That’s one reason why, in my values, I have home and feed views significantly discounted—my posting volume will change these values drastically, so I wanted to dampen the effect that any of them would have.

As it is, I have home and feed views on a 0th order of magnitude, permalinks/archives/cat views on a 1st order of magnitude, and comments/pingbacks/trackbacks on a 2nd order of magnitude. I’ve considered setting the 0th order variables to just plain 0, but for now, having it orders of magnitude below the others does all I want.

I suggest that you tweak your variables a number of times to get it in your head what entries have been “popular” for your Weblog in the past. You know your Weblog better than we do—you know where you’ve gotten feedback. Alex’s plugin just gives you a more holistic approach to know where eyeballs are going on your site.

Now, why do I have comments/pingbacks/trackbacks far higher than I do simple views from permalinks/categories/archives? I figure that comments and the like show an active interest in the entry. Views show a passive interest—probably because someone linked to me, or I hit the right keywords for some Google search or got linked without a ping. [For example, someone posted a suggestion I made for Links Manager autodiscovery here on the forum; if I hadn’t gotten a comment from XeroCool, I might not have known that the suggestion was popular without this plugin.]

I figure that publishing my most popular posts is going to drive a positive feedback to greater considerations of posts that have been popular in the past. It’s all like one of those fun perpetual motion machine clones you see in gadget stores. ??

I’m having an issue with 1.0b2: When I go to update my values, I get sent to a 404 URL: wp-content/plugins/popular-posts.php. That’s the old URL, not the new one…

Ok thanks for clearing all that up..I thought those numbers meant hits on the actual articles, not a blanket view just by virtue of being on the home page. I will adjust accordingly if need be.

I wonder if it would be feasible/logical to have an option to recalculate all the data after changing the values?

edit: I’m getting the same error as above when updating the values..

Geof and Arlo – I can’t reproduce that problem, very strange.

Arlo – see all the different columns in the most popular list? Those are the raw counts for each view/feedback type.

From the popularity values page: Adjust the values below as you see fit. When you save the new options the popularity rankings for your posts will be automatically updated to reflect the new values you have chosen.

I can only provide the information, I can’t make you read it. ??

ditto the problem:

‘The requested URL /wp-content/plugins/popularity-contest.php was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Thanks

DP oops

Alex – I misread that line from the page; I assumed it simply meant the values you enter will be updated, not the actual data.

The problem with this bug we’re experiencing seems to be that the “Update” button is jumping to ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ and ignoring the full path from root, which in my (and many peoples) case is ‘/wordpress/wp-content…’