Easy Top Post Widget

One of the things that has always bothered me about using Blogger.com as a blogging platform is how limited it is for adding extras to your blog such as a top posts widget. Sure it has gotten better, but if you use their FTP publishing service you are still limited to either some kind of server side scripting hack, doing it manually by editing the template HTML or some kind of Javascript widget. I have not found a decent top posts widget for Blogger.com up until now. I came across AideRSS a little while ago and quickly realized I could use it to add a dynamic top posts widget to my FTP published Blogger.com blog.

AideRSS is more than just a top posts widget. AideRSS is actually a way to sort through a lot of the noise by filtering out posts by different levels based on your interests. For example you might not want to read every single post Boing Boing posts. Using AideRSS you can subscribe in your RSS reader to the best posts that they create, thus eliminating some of the noise that can clog up your RSS reader.

The side benefit of AideRSS is that they create top posts widgets. You can submit your own blogs RSS feed, such as your Blogger.com blog and AideRSS will create a top posts list sorted by what they call postrank. You can choose the time period that you want the top posts to be created from. Either year, month, week or day, and the number of top posts you would like to show. Here is a sample of Epibloggers top posts widget showing the top five posts for the year.

If you are looking for a top posts widget for your blog the AideRSS widget might be just the one you are looking for. Because it is Javascript it will create no extra load on your web hosting if you use a self hosted blogging platform and if you are on a hosted blogging platform, such as Blogger.com, most allow some Javascript widgets to be added. You could even use it to show off your friends blogs top posts if you want. With a little CSS styling you could probably make it blend in perfectly with your blog.