Monthly Archives: March 2010

Popularity Contest Widget

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The Popularity Contest widget will only be viewed if the Popularity Contest plugin has been enabled. For information on how to enable a plugin, visit the Installed Plugins help post.

To Use the Popularity Contest Widget

  1. From within your Dashboard, go to Appearance > Widgets
  2. Locate the Popularity Contest widget in the Available Widgets group at the top of the page. Click on the widget and drag it into an available region such as Sidebar 1, Sidebar 2, etc.
  3. Once the widget has been positioned, click on its arrow to open up the widget control panel
    1. Widget Title: this is optional. If you don’t enter a title it will show the default widget title.
    2. Report Type: select one – there are many different options
    3. Number of posts to display: enter a value here.  Keep in mind that this will show as a list on your site.
    4. Exclude pages: if you are using Pages on your site you can choose to exclude them here
  4. Click the Save button when completed
  5. Click on the Visit Site link to see your new widget in action.

Popularity Settings

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There are several different configuration settings for the Popularity Contest plugin. To view these options, from within your Dashboard, go to Settings > Popularity.

Settings

This group of settings are general settings that provide a few basic filters / features.

  • Ignore views by site authors: default = Yes
    • This discounts views that are made by members of the site, which makes sense. You already know that your contributors will be visiting the site. By leaving this value set at Yes, you will receive a more accurate representation of popularity within the general audience.
  • Show popularity rank for posts: default = Yes
    • This provides the display of the footer popularity ranking on your posts.
  • Show the [?] help link: default = Yes
    • This provides links to help documentation
  • Search Engine Domains: default = google.com, yahoo.com, bing.com
    • This helps the plugin filter search engine bots which is good in two ways: it helps show you what search engines are crawling your content and it also helps report on bot activity versus human activity.

Popularity Values

The Popularity Values take all of the different view types that can be associated with your content and performs an aggregated calculation. This provides a way of weighting the results accordingly. For example, Permalink Views from Search Engines should not carry the same amount of weight as Permalink Views from human visitors. This is because the search engine bots crawl your content automatically whereas human views are actual people who are visiting your site, which is really a  more accurate representation of how popular your content really is.

There are several different values that can be weighted differently:

  • Permalink Views
  • Permalink Views from Search Engines
  • Home Views
  • Archive Views
  • Category Views
  • Tag Views
  • Feed Views
  • Comments
  • Pingbacks
  • Trackbacks

When a value is set for these items, it is then multipled against the actual number of visits your content has received and then the total of all different views is summed together – this is what provides the ranking.

The default numbers provided should serve as a good start, but you can adjust all of them, if desired.

Popularity Contest Plugin

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The Popularity Contest plugin will gather and display information about the popularity of different posts and pages on your blog site. This useful tool provides a wealth of different reports on such things as:

  • Permalink views
  • Permalink views from search engines
  • Home views
  • Archive views
  • Category views
  • Tag views
  • Feed views
  • Comments
  • Pingbacks
  • Trackbacks

Reports based on the above information are then generated and can be displayed in a widget on your blog site, if you so choose.

Once the Popularity Contest plugin is activated a few different things will happen:

  • The Popularity Contest widget will be available in the Appearance > Widgets control panel.
  • The Most Popular Posts menu link, which is a link to a variety of reports generated by the Popularity Contest plugin, will appear in your Dashboard menu block.
  • The Popularity configuration option will be available in the Settings > Popularity control panel.
  • All content on your blog site will display a footer that details the popularity ranking of that particular post.

To view help instructions on the Popularity Contest widget and settings, just click on the following provided links:

You can also locate the specific help post in the Categories menu on this site.