Show your sites popular posts with the BlogStorm Widget

by Patrick Altoft on June 12, 2007 / one response

We are pleased to release a new widget for webmasters who want to
include link data from the BlogStorm tracker on their blogs. Most of
the data is already available as an RSS feed or embeddable chart but
this new widget adds an extra way for you and your readers to track
the popularity of your blogs.

Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim came up with the suggestion and we
custom coded the widget as a white label product. As you can see from
the screenshot to the right Andy is already using the widget and it looks
great. Check it out for yourself at the bottom right hand site of
Marketing Pilgrim.

The code


<iframe src ="

&limit=5&bg=ffffff&font=bb1c1c&width=160"
width="160" border="0" SCROLLING="NO" style="border:0px;" height="290"></iframe><noframes><a href="http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/
tracker/marketingpilgrim.com/">Links to marketingpilgrim.com</a></noframes>


To obtain your code either change marketingpilgrim.com for your site or click on the “Embed” link on your tracker page as shown in the screenshot below.

The customisation options are fairly straightforward, the parameters
are as follows:

• site: this should read yoursite.com, don’t use the http://www.
• Limit: the number of links you want to display
• bg: the background colour of the widget
• font: the font color of the post titles
• width: widget width

The height can be controlled by altering the height of the iframe

WordPress Plugin

For those of you who use WordPress I have written a plugin to add the widget to your sidebar.

Instructions:

• 1. Upload blogstormpopular.php` to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
• 2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
• 3. Click on “Presentation” tab, then “Sidebar Widgets” subtab. You will see blogstorm from the “Available Widgets” list.
• 4. Drag and drop it to your template sidebar, click on the widget setting and follow the instructions on there to set it up.

Download BlogStorm Popular WordPress Plugin

Initially we were using script tags but this isn’t an ideal way of
adding a widget to your site. If the BlogStorm site goes down (like it
did for a short period while we hit the Digg front page and the
del.icio.us popular list (twice) yesterday) your site won’t load if it
is calling a script from BlogStorm. Using an iframe eliminates this
issue, if our site goes down the contents of the frame simply don’t
display and your site loads fine. We don’t expect the site to go down
but we certainly don’t want your sites to be affected if we do.

If you really hate iframes then you might want to use the script
version instead:


<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/

font=bb1c1c&width=160&height=290"></script>


You might want to check some of your other widgets on your sites as slow loading scripts can really cause problems with your site. Converting them to use an iframe is
quite straightforward, I might cover that in another blog post if anybody wants me to.

If you have any problems or want to request new features please post
in the comments.

Post category: Blogstorm Tweet

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.