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.
How it works
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.
Installation
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
Usage
Once installed, the popular posts asides section will be generated whenever you run
rake generate
No additional steps are necesary.
Post install configurations
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
Updating the plugin
Upon new updates, run the following command
bundle exec octopress-popular-posts install
Post remove configurations
To remove the plugin, run the following command
bundle exec octopress-popular-posts remove
You will also need to remove the following configurations
- The octopress-popular-posts gem from your Gemfile
- The popular_posts_count variable from your config.yml
- The popular posts asides under defaults_asides from your config.yml
Other themes and plugins
Shameless plug: more themes and plugins are available on Octopress themes. Feel free to take a look.
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 Wong Liang Zan. MIT License