Show them your most popular posts in 3 steps
Listen to this article Have you ever wondered how you could bring up the absolutely most popular topics of your blog, and put them in a list on your blog home page?
I hadn't really, until I saw some other blogs (non-CS) that had a list of those on their home pages. As a reader I thought that was great. I had never read anything by this blogger before, but here I was presented by a couple of (probably according to his readers) posts, that was the most popular and interesting ones.
Wouldn't it be a good way to attract first time readers of your blog, to maybe become a returning visitor to your blog? The most amazing things you've written are not necessarily hidden in the archives, but hanging right there on your front door.
Anyway, I wanted one, couldn't find one, so I developed one. It ended up to be a CommunityServer.Blogs.Controls.WeblogThemedControl. Had never done that before, so it's was a good learning.
Three steps to install the control (assuming you have it downloaded and unzipped 
- Copy the DLL to the BIN directory of you CS installation
- Copy the ASCX to the SKIN directory of the blog skin that you are using.
- Add 2 rows in i.e. Skin-BlogSideBar.asxc
- A directive to register the control on the page
- A ASP .NET tag where the control should be shown
That's all!
I probably talk a bit about the code and structure of it in an upcoming blog post.
Hope you enjoy, and please give any feedback you have on it by dropping a comment. There might be some more versions of it when I have had the time to look through the code a bit more, fixed any bugs, and maybe added some functionality.
Download it here!
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