Easy way to make a Top Posts page for your blog

More and more blogs are displaying a top posts page. This is very useful for new readers, as they might not have enough time to browse through the archives of an old blog recently discovered. When AllTipsAndTricks celebrated 5 months old, I wrote a “best posts” article, but I did it manually, after checking my stats, and I put only the top most visited posts, not categorized. There is a quicker and more professional way for WordPress users to do it: the top posts by category plugin. Developed by Marc Hil Macalua, the plugin offers the possibility to choose between top visited or top commented posts:

Plugin Features

• You can choose between displaying top visited posts or top commented posts.
• You can choose to display top posts by category or you can display the top posts regardless of category (or as I would like to call it ala Royal Rumble)
• You can choose to display the actual number of visits or comments for each post featured on the best list.
• You can control the number of top posts to display, i.e. display N top posts per category.

I installed it yesterday on a special Top posts page, and when I looked at the page I had the big surprise to see that my list contained only two or three posts, with only a few visits for each. I checked again the installation, and then looked again at the Top posts page: now I had a bit more posts on the list. So I realized what was happening: the plugin has its internal counter, and it just started to count visits from the moment I activated it. It is still cool, I let it run, but the top posts list will be relevant only after a few more weeks.

I discovered the Top posts plugin via JohnTP’s blog, which I encourage you to read, as it offers great tools for bloggers.

If somebody knows how to make this plugin count also the visits from an earlier date, I would appreciate your comment here, so we can all benefit from it.