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Updating my Popular Post table by hand because the plugin doesn’t work.
Have you ever wondered how it is possible that really ugly music reaches the first place in the billboard singles chart?
The billboard singles chart is a comparative report of the amount of singles sold. Which means that the amount of singles that an artist needs to sell to reach first place varies over the year.
A few years ago I read that for the Dutch market it could vary with as much as a few thousand percents. In a slow period an artist only needs to sell a few thousand singles to reach first place. In other periods he has to sell a few hundred thousand singles to even enter the billboard.
And of course if a single reaches first place the chances of it being sold increase dramatically.
Nowadays people download a lot, but some twenty years ago teens would go to the record shop to listen to a few singles and buy some. Since nobody wanted to listen to every available single they would start at the top and work their way down. An ugly single in first place had a better chance of being sold then a good single in 100th place.
So a single that is released in a really slow period, say at the beginning of the year, not only has a good chance of reaching first place but also of staying there for a long time.
A few weeks ago I wrote that I suspected that I had a similar problem with my Popular Post Plugin.
I installed the plugin shortly after I started this blog. At that time I didn’t have many readers and a post only needed some five or six pageviews to reach first place. Being in first place a posting would have a better chance of being read and gaining points.
The last few days I’ve researched the problem a little more and found that I was wrong.
Checking my Google statistics I found that the Promen article that the Popular Post Plugin put on first place only has 4 pageviews where as the post about my new pencil box has more then 700 pageviews.
Even if you include pageviews via RSS (which I didn’t have when I published the Promen article) and links from other sites (which I do have but not to this article) I really don’t understand how the Promen post could get in first place.
So I’m assuming that there is something wrong with the plugin.
I’ve tried re-installing it but it seems that the plugin has it’s own table in the database. At this moment I don’t trust my knowledge of databases enough to try to delete that table.
But even if I could re-install the plugin I don’t know if it would do me any good. If there’s a problem in the way the plugin calculates first place, the problem would probably come back.
So for the time being I will be editing my popular post table by hand. Using data from Google analyze. That will disregard the number of readers that use RSS. But seeing as they subscribed because they like my post I’m assuming that won’t matter to much.
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