Coolest Simple Plugin of the Day: WP-PostViews

*Note: I’ve since quit using this plugin because the post counts never expire.  This caused my oldest posts to be shown as my most popular posts, which is clearly incorrect.  I’ve written the Recently Popular plugin to correct this.

WordPress has no shortage of plugins. This one is one of the ones that is a real joy to work with, has a specific function, does it well, and just gets out of your way.

WP-PostViews does just what the name suggests: It tracks the number of views that your posts get. For this blog that allows me to keep articles that are seeing the most traffic on the front page without having to suspend my blogging, munge the start date, or otherwise change the format of my blog.

To get this superior plugin visit it here:

http://lesterchan.net/wordpress/readme/wp-postviews.html

Thanks to Jeffro2pt0 and the guys in FreeNode’s #wordpress for pointing this one out.

PS: If some of the view counts look “off” that’s because I didn’t dig through my entire Apache history looking for hits.  I put the correct number of hits in for the past three months for the top four articles.