What is a good algorithm for showing the most popular blog posts?

Question

I'm planning on developing my own plugin for showing the most popular posts, as well as counting how many times a post has been read.

But I need a good algorithm for figuring out the most popular blog post, and a way of counting the number of times a post has been viewed.

A problem I see when it comes to counting the number of times a post has been read, is to avoid counting if the same person opens the same post many times in a row, as well as avoiding web crawlers.

Answer 1

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-popular-posts/

Comes in the form of a plugin. No muss, no fuss.

Answer 2

'Live' counters are easily implementable and a dime a dozen. If they become too cumbersome on high traffic blogs, the usual way is to parse webserver access logs on another server periodically and update the database. The period can vary from a few minutes to a day, depending on how much lag you deem acceptable.

Answer 3

There are two ways of going about this:

1. You could consider the individual page hits [through the Apache/IIS logs] and use that
2. Use Google Page rank to emphasize pages that are strongly linked to [popular posts would no longer be based on visits but on the amount of pages that link to it]