We love Canadian startup PostRank here at ReadWriteWeb, but today the company has really outdone itself with the release of a powerful and eye catching new widget to display your blog’s hottest posts.
PostRank scores every item in your (or any) RSS feed, by number of comments, inbound links, saves in Delicious, mentions on Twitter, votes on Digg, etc. It then offers a filtered view or feed of the most relatively popular posts in that feed. The new top posts widget offers powerful new functionality, can be customized and installed in less than a few minutes and looks really hot.
The widget offers not just the top posts but also lets readers perform a search of your blog, view and subscribe to just the most popular posts containing those keywords. You want an RSS feed of just the most popular posts on ReadWriteWeb about mobile apps, or the semantic web, or politics? This new widget will give you one in seconds. You can even do searches like: mobile -semantic.
Some publishers might hesitate to let users easily subscribe to such a filtered feed from their site – but those are often people who wouldn’t subscribe at all if you didn’t give them such a personalized option.
We’ve embedded the widget below – give it a try and you’ll see what a powerful experience it offers.
The new widget also comes with a WordPress plug-in that will display each post’s Postrank score in your WordPress dashboard. That’s pretty hot.
Using this widget out of the box is really easy and it should fit nicely on your blog’s sidebar. Unfortunately changing the size of the widget to put it anywhere else is a real pain – you can see all the white space above. It made us quite angry, in fact! The company said there was a bug that should be fixed promptly though, so hopefully all problems will be solved. There really are too few customization options. It would also be nice to be able to hover over the post rank numbers and see a popup of criteria for that score as well, as you can on the main site.
That minor frustration aside, we’re very impressed with this new widget’s speed and functionality. We expect to see it on a lot of blog sidebars around the web soon.
