First look at these two previous articles about customizing popular posts gadget:
Shuffle Blogger popular posts and
Excluding specific popular posts in Blogger.
If you exclude posts from popular posts gadget, then you don't have exact count of popular posts – the count depends on how many excluded posts were in the list.
With this hack you can shuffle and then limit the count of popular posts. If you already have installed the shuffle hack, replace it with this code. You can put this code in a HTML/Javascript gadget, or in html template before </body>.
This hack is installed on this blog, I use 10 popular posts, from which I exclude the current post user is viewing, and some others. Then the list is shuffled and limited to 8 entries. Modify the popcount variable in the script to get a different amount of posts. In my MS-potilas blog I use five popular posts, picked from ten posts minus some possible excluded posts.
Showing posts with label shuffle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shuffle. Show all posts
Monday, December 12, 2011
Sunday, December 4, 2011
7
Shuffle Blogger Popular Posts
Blogger's popular posts gadget is a great way to introduce more interesting topics in your blog to an occasional reader. The gadget uses blog statistics, and the most popular post (from the chosen period or all time) is displayed first, second popular is second, etc.
The gadget is really great, but I missed some features. If you have always the same list in the same order in your sidebar, users very quickly ignore it. But if you shuffle the entries, the list looks fresh every page load. And I could not tell, which one of my most popular posts is the best, they are all good ;) and so random order suits them better.
So my first hack (more coming along) for the Popular Posts gadget randomizes the order of the popular posts. You can install this by adding extra HTML/Javascript gadget in your sidebar or paste the code to an existing gadget (the gadget must be after the popular posts gadget!), or you can put this code in your template html, just before </body>.
I use a simple but effective Fisher-Yates/Knuth shuffle to shuffle the posts. You must have jQuery loaded in your page for the code to work. If the script did nothing to your popular posts list, try adding the following code, which loads jQuery, in your template before </head>:
The gadget is really great, but I missed some features. If you have always the same list in the same order in your sidebar, users very quickly ignore it. But if you shuffle the entries, the list looks fresh every page load. And I could not tell, which one of my most popular posts is the best, they are all good ;) and so random order suits them better.
So my first hack (more coming along) for the Popular Posts gadget randomizes the order of the popular posts. You can install this by adding extra HTML/Javascript gadget in your sidebar or paste the code to an existing gadget (the gadget must be after the popular posts gadget!), or you can put this code in your template html, just before </body>.
I use a simple but effective Fisher-Yates/Knuth shuffle to shuffle the posts. You must have jQuery loaded in your page for the code to work. If the script did nothing to your popular posts list, try adding the following code, which loads jQuery, in your template before </head>:
<script src='http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js' type='text/javascript'></script>I'm very pleased with the result of the hack, and hope you like it, too. You can see a working example of this in my MS-potilas blog ("Popular Posts" is "Suositut artikkelit" in Finnish), and later I'll install this also on YABTB (now installed).
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