Month: September 2015

Get The Most Popular Posts From The WordPress API

As of right now the WordPress plugin directory holds 40,367 plugins. Finding the one you need is typically pretty easy with the hardest part choosing which one suits your needs the best.

In my particular use case, I am building a new section on a site that will be completely outside of WordPress. Even though it’s outside WordPress, I still wanted to pull in a list of the most popular posts.

Searching for most popular in the plugin directory returned 614 different plugins, but I couldn’t find any that would work in this context. A lot of them do their calculations by literally storing views for each visit. I see no reason to fill up my database with this data when an external system is already logging it. That is when I remembered WordPress has it’s own API and can be utilized directly from the Stats package.

I went on a mission to implement this and wanted to share how to do it. Continue reading “Get The Most Popular Posts From The WordPress API”

Install ALL Google fonts on your Mac

Lately, I’ve been designing a lot of blog post images and finding a good font from the list of defaults is sometimes hard. I came across the Web Font Load project by Quinton Pike that allows you to install all of the Google Web Fonts onto your local machine.

The only downside is it’s a ton of fonts, 1660+. Wading through all of them in a graphics app can be time-consuming, however, since many blog posts have been written on font pairings and you can easily find the best ones by doing a quick web search.