February 15, 2019

All Posts by Category

By Max Drake Visualisation, Wordpress 0 Comments

Article on process for setting up this page

Intent of post and setup process

I have been on a few really interesting blog sites, getting there from my RSS feed to find a great article, and when I go to explore further posts on the site I find they are hard to navigate.

I plan to make a “Sticky Post” of this article so that all the posts I have done can be looked at by category.

So I looked at plugins. I came across this article that I thought was interesting and realised that I was already using WordPress Popular Posts plugin in the widget area. I found out that it can be used for post and pages too. This pleased me as I do not want to load up another plugin if I have one that can do 2 jobs.

One thing that stymied me for a while was getting the Post Category ID’s as these are not shown on the category page. I watched a video that described where the ID was and I opened up most of the categories before I realised you could get the ID quickly by hovering over the category, see below

The short code that I’m using is as follows:

For popular posts with thumbnails (replace xxx with wpp at the front of line below):

"[xxx range="all" limit=10 stats_views=1 order_by="views" stats_date=1 thumbnail_width=100 thumbnail_height=100 ]"

For listing the other posts by categories (replace xxx with wpp at the front of line below):

"[xxx cat="27" range="all" post_type='post' stats_views=1 limit=30 wpp_start='<ol>' wpp_end='</ol>' order_by="views" ]"

Resources:

There is a github page for the plugin here.

There is a Wiki help page here.

For actual code it suggests you look at the plugin on your site. For a complete list of parameters & additional examples, please visit Settings > WordPress Popular Posts > Parameters.

Thank you.

I would like to say thank you to Héctor Cabrera for such a useful and versatile plugin with good resources as well.

Sticky Post

I was wondering how I was going to give visitors access to the posts, either in the menu to a page, or the widget sidebar with a TEXT widget. Then I saw that you can do a sticky post, so I thought, for first try, I will stick it at the top of my posts and see if that works. This is how you do it.

Setting up links in page

To setup links for categories in the page I selected the category list in the post side panel and pasted thenm into a spreadsheet, then used CONCAT() to join all the HTML bits of code as well as the names.

Then copied the resulting column & used PASTE AS VALUES to get the code to paste into the actual post.

End comment

Seeing all the categories listed in this manner has made me think about my categorization. I may consider adjusting some of them. There is already one that I only have one post associated with that category that I’ll be removing.

Hopefully visitors will be able to access more content with this easy browsing tool.

I’m using an in-page link using Category ID in the list at the beginning and the articles with a Go to Top back link to get back to the main list so its easy to navigate up and down the page quickly.

I did consider having a pull down menu so that you choose a category to load, as this current process loads all of the categories with all the short codes. I’m not sure how to code that, but I’ll think about it for the future.

I only included thumbnails for the top posts as I didn’t want to slow the post down any further.

Post Views

I want to make a quick comment about Post Views.

I have Google Analytics running, I have Linked In view count on that, I have CloudFlare stats as well as Popular Post Views. They all seem to tell different stories. Some are blocked from counting by AddBlockers in browsers, others have odd count methods, such as LinkedIn that counts if it gets on a device, the receiver does not have to look at the post but it is still classified as a “View” which is pretty rubbish really as its not telling you anything intelligent.

Also the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) process has an influence on where your posts come from different searches. I seem to have a highish ranking for OpenMaint but not for a number of other areas. The productivity and Windows free tools and tips and tricks are in a popularist area so my ranking with these will be pretty low. Until recently I haven’t bothered with any SEO issues at all, and I’m still pretty naive on the process.

What the counts does, in my opinion, is show some articles that have become popular. It is worth noting, in the most popular post list that the posts that rank high are older posts, so they have more time to be viewed too. I added this view counter addin somewhere between 9-12 months ago and the site has been running a lot longer than that, so the counts are only an indication.

My intentions are to, hopefully, draw visitors to look at other articles that I think may be of interest to them too by making the category listing more easy to see. We’ll see if that does happen.

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