Octopress Popular Posts Plugin

Popular posts plugin adds a popular posts asides section to your Octopress blog. Popularity of the post is calculated by the Google page rank.

The popular posts template is generated with the blog. It makes queries to check the page rank for each post. Once generated, the popular posts asides section is a static page. Which means popularity is updated only when the site is generated.

Popular posts plugin caches the page rank results of each post. The results are stored in the .page_ranks directory of your blog. When there is a cache, the plugin will read from it. When there is no cache, it will generate one. Caches expires in 1 month. This shortens the time needed to generate your blog.

Google page rank is updated every 3 months. A static page is sufficient as page rank don't change every hour.

The plugin is distributed by Ruby gems.

Add this line to your Gemfile

gem 'octopress-popular-posts'

Install it using Bundler

bundle install

We have to run installation commands to copy the plugin to your source

bundle exec octopress-popular-posts install

Once installed, the popular posts asides section will be generated whenever you run

rake generate

No additional steps are necesary.

In your blog's config.yml, add this line.

popular_posts_count: 5      # Posts in the sidebar Popular Posts section

This sets the number of popular posts to show.

Next, we need to add the popular post aside section.

default_asides: [custom/asides/about.html, custom/asides/subscribe.html, custom/asides/popular_posts.html, asides/recent_posts.html, asides/github.html, asides/twitter.html, asides/delicious.html, asides/pinboard.html, asides/googleplus.html]

Note the custom/asides/popular_posts.html that is added on the third entry of the array.

Once done, you need to generate the blog.

rake generate

The first run will take some time as the cache for popular plugins is created. You should see the popular posts aside section on your blog.

I also suggest that you ignore the cached page rank files by adding this line to your .gitignore

.page_ranks

Upon new updates, run the following command

bundle exec octopress-popular-posts install

To remove the plugin, run the following command

bundle exec octopress-popular-posts remove

You will also need to remove the following configurations

1. The octopress-popular-posts gem from your Gemfile
2. The popular_posts_count variable from your config.yml
3. The popular posts asides under defaults_asides from your config.yml

Shameless plug: more themes and plugins are available on Octopress themes. Feel free to take a look.

Copyright &copy 2012 Wong Liang Zan. MIT License