Popular Links

<1 min read

I've implemented a way to view the linkblog's Popular Links. The page and feeds list the most popular links in the last 24 hours. The lists are updated at least every hour.

You may have noticed that, for the last few days, all links are redirected when clicked. Needless to say that IPs are checked for dups, etc. The user agents are also matched against a list of some 400 known bots, crawlers and spiders. I'll post in more details about the bot discovery process later in the week.

I'm still debating whether I want to include the number of reads on the page. I pretty much decided against doing so in the feeds, as it would cause aggregators that do not pay attention to modification dates (like bloglines, etc.) to constantly reload the feed.

I'm still working a few of the details out, but as usual, let me know if there are any problems.

Comments

2 (Closed)

Rob Sanheim

Feb 15, 2006

Interesting.

I know I'll be checking out the popular things from time to time, though I hope your readers show a bit more intelligence then the typical Digg or Javablog reader. :)
eu

Feb 15, 2006

Eric, why don't you just publish new entry in the rss every hour? Then counters won't be an issues and rss itself won't look bad in the aggregator like it does now when you have every link as separate entry in the feed... I can send you screenshot of Bloglines if you like.