Top 'O the Week

A lot of professional blogs that I know have some features that can be automated.  One of the "features" that I'm working on is something that reports the top post of the week, top 3 for the month, and top posts of the year or all time.  It's really very simple.  You need to monitor you blog using a tool like Google Analytics.  Then you need another tool runs a simple process over the analytics output to generate the Top N page.  I tried hosting the tool in the cloud, but for some reason, Google App Engine doesn't like the way I use stylesheets to process things.  It has something to do with how they've plugged some security vulnerabilities in the Java XSLT implementation.  I'll figure it out eventually, but I might just give up an go to my own hosted box, since that will be quite a bit easier to deal with.  I can just FTP to that to deploy new code, and have much more control over what can be done.

In any case, the real trick to it is to use the Google Analytics API to get a feed for the metrics I want.  In my case, I'm looking for top hits in the last week, month, year and all time.  I then run that feed through an XSLT transform to generate a simplifed XHTML result.  That result just contains the blog post title and a link to it.

So enough jabber, here's the data:

Top post of the week:

1. Meaningful Use Posters

Top 3 for the last month:

1. Meaningful Use Standards Summary
2. How to use HITSP C32 Version 2.5 for Meaningful Use
3. Meaningful Use Posters

Top 10 for the last year:

1. Meaningful Use Standards Summary
2. Template Identifiers, Business Rules and Degrees of Interoperability
3. Laboratory Orders
4. Demystifying SAEAF...maybe
5. Where in the World is XDS
6. IHE Releases Trial Implementation Profiles
7. Meaningful Use IFR Comments
8. Recognition
9. What is HITSP Doing?
10. A Quick Overview of the ebXML RIM objects in XDS Metadata

 Top Posts Ever

1. Meaningful Use Standards Summary
2. Clinical Decision Support
3. Template Identifiers, Business Rules and Degrees of Interoperability
4. Laboratory Orders
5. Demystifying SAEAF...maybe
6. If I had a Hammer
7. Where in the World is XDS
8. IHE Releases Trial Implementation Profiles
9. Meaningful Use IFR Comments
10. What is HITSP Doing?

Up until the release of meaningful use regulations, this blog averaged around 500 hits a week, or a little more than 2000 hits a month.  The current trend indicates that the new average will be around 1000 hits after things settle out.  The Meaningful Use Summary post is still getting around 25 hits a day, but I expect that to trail off soon.  Clinical decision support is still now the second most popular topics I've written on, but it has not gotten much traffic lately.

Of course none of these reports really list the most popular web page I had a hand in.  That's here and the single page gotten more hits (82,000+) in 8 months than this entire blog (48,000+) in two years.