Octopress Gauges Popular Posts Plugin

Popular posts plugin adds a popular asides section to your Octopress blog. Popularity of the posts is calculated by page views tracked through Gaug.es.

This gem is modelled after the octopress-popular-posts gem.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'octopress-gauges-popular-posts'

Install it using Bundler:

$ bundle

And run the installation to copy the plugin to your source:

$ bundle exec octopress-gauges-popular-posts install

Post install configurations

Add the Gaug.es Tracking ID of your blog and your Gaug.es API token to your config.yml:

gauges_tracking_id: <your-tracking-id>

Also add the following 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.

The installation created the config file in the .page_views directory. In there you have to add your Gaug.es API token and you can also add the date started tracking your site with Gaug.es.

:token: <your-api-token>
:signup_date: 2013-06-03

If a singup_date is given, thes gem will fetch the views since then. Depending on the distance, this may take a while.

Once done, you need to generate the blog:

$ rake generate

I also suggest that you ignore the cached page views files and the config file with your Gaug.es API token by adding this line to your .gitignore:

.page_views

Usage

Once installed, the popular posts asides section will be generated whenever you run

$ rake generate

No additional steps are necesary.

Updating the plugin

After updating the gem:

$ bundle update octopress-gauges-popular-posts

Run the following command:

$ bundle exec octopress-gauges-popular-posts install

Removal

To remove the plugin, run the following command:

$ bundle exec octopress-gauges-popular-posts remove

You will also need to remove the following configurations:

1. The octopress-popular-posts gem from your Gemfile
2. The gauges_tracking_id variable from your config.yml
3. The popular_posts_count variable from your config.yml
4. The popular posts asides under defaults_asides from your config.yml
5. The cache directory .page_views

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request