Top Ten

[Hamsterpants]

Hi All,

I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

I have a site where members can add new links. I would like to display the most viewed links, but obviously the links which are added first will potentially have more views then the most recent added ones. Can someone please suggest a way to do this so that it only looks over a certain period of whatever.

Thanks in advance
Dill

[travelbuff]

How about this...compute the rank the links are in, then store that in a column. In another column, track the click throughs. Then after a specified period, recalculate the ranking and reset the click through column back to zero. That would give you the ability to rank them over whatever interval you wanted.

Another option would be to have a 'current period' click thorugh column and a 'historical' click through column. At the first of every month, rank the sites according to current month click throughs, add the current total to the historical total and reset current to zero.

[Hamsterpants]

thanks for your reply, ok I think I get what you are saying. I think what I was doing wrong, is I was calculating the ranking on the fly, but what you are suggesting is rather recalculate the top ten once every what ever period based on the number of hits for that period.

Thanks very much

Dill

[Hamsterpants]

sorry meant to ask, would I reculate the new ranking using a cron job that would run at a set time?

Dill

[travelbuff]

That's how I would do it. There are other more complicated workarounds if you don't have access to crontab, but cron would be first prize.

[TheDefender]

You know you could do a weighted thing so new and old links alike have an equal shot...

You could probably come up with a pretty simple algorithm based on the number of times the link is displayed versus the number of times it's clicked... You can use a bit of a bell curve (like in school) to weigh the links to an even keel.