Playing With Plugins
Posted in OAImages News by John E. Pannell on November 28th, 2008 at 5:02 am Some of you may have noticed some changes to the blog layout recently, and at least one problem that temporarily messed some things up. One of the benefits of Word Press, as blogging software, is the wide variety of plugins available to perform specialized tasks that are not part of the standard package. I’ve been playing with several of these lately.
After the jump is a list of the recent plugins I’ve added and what they’re designed to do.
Word Press Related Posts
This plug-in has been in use for a couple of weeks now on the site. All the posts on this blog have had “tags” assigned to them, words or short phrases that describe the content of the post. For each post, this plug-in examines that posts tags and suggests other possibly related posts based upon those tags. Random posts are displayed if no related posts are found. This will help readers find older posts that might be of interest to them, but otherwise forgotten since they’re no longer displayed on the blog’s main page.
So far, this plugin appears to be successful in helping readers find those older, but still interesting, blog posts.
Shared Items Posts
This is one that I really undecided over whether I’ll keep on using it as it does require some work from me that I normally don’t do. Your feedback is appreciated here.
The plugin works in conjunction with Google’s RSS reader. It reads my public shared items page and generates a post on this blog at intervals I specify. Most of these shared posts will not be Scouting related and will include items about technology, general news items, political commentary, or other topics that I find interesting. Currently this set at a daily frequency but that may change.
Best Posts
This is the plugin that caused me some trouble a few days ago. Between some questionable programming, a confusing option, and my feeble attempts to fix everything an infinite loop may have resulted that brought my server to its knees and created several hundred duplicate posts. It also turned out to get it to do what I wanted, I needed the “Popularity Contest” plugin (below), too. I will soon know whether this is now working as it should.
This plugin, should I keep it, will generate a weekly post of the “most popular” blog entries (see below) for the past week. It can be configured for different time periods and number of posts shown. Currently I have it set to post weekly and show the top three posts from the past week.
This plugin can also show the most frequently commented posts for a particular time interval. Bill Mulrenin uses this option on his NY OA Trader blog.
Popularity Contest
This plug-in ranks posts by their popularity. This “popularity” is a score for each post based upon a number of categories, each with differing values assigned to them. Currently I have left the scoring at its default setting:
| Permalink Views: | 10 |
| Home Views: | 2 |
| Archive Views: | 4 |
| Category Views: | 6 |
| Feed Views (full content only): | 1 |
| Comments: | 20 |
| Pingbacks: | 50 |
| Trackbacks: | 80 |
The scoring of posts started on 11/26/08, but this also includes historical data that was already stored in the blog’s database. Data from before 11/26 used to calculate “popularity” includes number of views (number of single view), pingbacks and comments. Data for the other variables are not normally stored by Word Press, so points for them started accumulating on 11/26.
As you can see, the easiest ways for a blog reader to push a post up the popularity scale is to comment on it, or create a trackback to it on their own blog or website.
Popularity: 15% [?]
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