Community Server on my mind

Show them your most popular posts in 3 steps

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

1. Copy the DLL to the BIN directory of you CS installation
2. Copy the ASCX to the SKIN directory of the blog skin that you are using.
3. 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!