Popular Posts Plugin for Octopress

This post describes the octopress-popular-posts for Octopress. Although there is one plugin that does the job, it used Google Page Rank to determine if a post is popular or not. I'd like to, however, use the page view of the post as metric.

How To Use

In another post, I described how to use the octopress-page-view plugin to show the PV of each post and the whole site. This plugin depend on that to generate each post's PV count. So you need to first install that plugin.

Installation

• Clone the repo from Github

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/jhshi/octopress-popular-posts.git
cd octopress-popular-posts

The structure of the directory will look like this

octopress-popular-posts/
|-- _config.yml
|-- plugins
|   `-- popular_posts.rb
|-- README.md
`-- source
    `-- _include
        `-- custom
            `-- asides
                `-- popular_posts.html

• Copy plugins/popular_posts.rb to your plugins directory. And place source/include/custom/asides/popular_posts.html in your custom asides directory.

• Add this asides to your asides list in _config.yml

Configuration

This plugin doesn't need any special configurations, as long as you set octopress-page-view plugin correctly, it should work out of box.

There is one parameters you can tune, though. You can set how many popular posts will be shown in popular_posts.html

How It Works

octopress-page-view has done all the hard job for us. All we need to do is just sort the posts by their page view count.

Note that we need to set the priority of this plugin as low, since we reply on octopress-page-view plugin to run first to generate the PV count.

class PopularPosts < Generator
    safe :true
    priority :low

    def generate(site)
      # require octopress-page-view plugin
      if !site.config['page-view']
        return
      end

      popular_posts = site.posts.sort do |px, py|
        # just catch the rare case
        if px.data['_pv'] == nil || py.data['_pv'] == nil then 0
        elsif px.data['_pv'] > py.data['_pv'] then -1
        elsif px.data['_pv'] < py.data['_pv'] then 1
        else 0
        end
      end

      site.config.merge!('popular_posts' => popular_posts)
    end
end

One trick I did here is that, site object has not data field to merge into, so I merge the popular_posts data to site.config.