Lasting Rose

Sunanda Sasi - Photo by Indiatimes

Even though the algorithms of Google with names like Penguin and Panda had evolved to weed out fake content from the cyberspace, Google gives appropriate weight to recommendation to social media.

These are typically obtained through the share buttons provided by Facebook, Twitter and many others which need to be included in your content.

However, a growing number of experts feel that the share buttons have outlived their utility and appeal to draw visitors to click them. Moreover their unseemly presence all over the page, resulting from indiscreet use aimed at getting as many clicks as possible, is also putting off many people.

A growing number of web users do not use them at all for recommending a web page. Many experts believe that eventually everything will come back to old style text links and have even started to provide those instead of  the social media buttons.

All these go with the vein and philosophy of Google that only genuine, fresh and unique content needs to be taken in to account and presented in searches. Experts argue that such content will impress readers enough for them to recommend them to others without the buttons.

 No one is going to add up all those numbers in individual share button boxes to decide how many people have visited the page. A page count should be readily and easily available to the visitor to be effective in persuading him or her to read on and perhaps recommend to others.

That is where the post counts for such content becomes a useful and convincing piece of information to the reader. This is especially true for unique and compelling content which Google consider as the ones to be promoted.

The problem is that such page view counters are not readily provided by blogging platforms like Google’s BlogSpot or Wordpress even though Google has a mechanism to give this information in the admin section. However, it is not clear whether you need to install the Google Analytics, which slows page loading, to see this. Google also may have a commercial reason to withhold this information from the site visitors.

For Wordpress at least, thankfully there are some plug-ins, which can be easily installed. For BlogSpot however, there is hardly any help available from the wider community though a couple of scripts are available on the net which doesn’t seem to work.

One solution, provided by Mybloggertricks.com using a third party database called FIREBASE seems to be a good possibility though it is not working with many modern templates of BlogSpot.

However we have managed to get it working after some serious digging and a good dose of help from the folks at FIREBASE.

However the MBT script was generating data sets for each value for a given string identifier like “name” but the script will output a visitor number only when the value was a pure string like “more”. Please see here for a full description.

The problem with blogging platforms is that each blog post is dynamically generated and it is nearly impossible to have a unique identifier other than its title, which is also dynamically included in the html in a modern blogging platform. ( Google actually introduces a ID number also in the blogger blogs. )

However the MBT script didn’t work with the post itle either, one plausible explanation being it was not available to the script until after the page fully loaded by which time it was too late.

Fortunately, some expert advice to deal with this issue was available at Buggy Bread and following their advice seems to solve the problem.

For anyone who would like and feel competent enough to install the MBT script for Google’s BloSpot Blog,  here are the steps which worked for this blog to get the script working as you can see from the working counter on the top left.

(Please note the steps below are given without any guaranty, warranty or indemnity for consequential losses or damage and must be followed at your own risk and peril.)

- Install the MBT script as instructed by Mybloggertips. Com here.
- Check if it is working for your blog.
- If not, first back up your Blog template.
- Open your Blog template in the BlogSpot HTML editor.

-    Locate the Java Script given by MBT and placed just before the </body> tag.
-    Rename  “ name” to “pname” in three places in the script. 
-    Use Ctrl + f and find the code <b:includable id='post' var='post'>
-    Place the following code below it. 
-    <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
-    <a expr:pname='data:post.title'/>
-          </b:if>

- Click the preview template button and make sure the page is loading without errors.
- Save your template by clicking the save template button
- Hopefully your counter must show up with a number next time you open that page which will increment every time a visitor visits the page.
- You can check the pages that have been visited by logging in to your FIREBASE database.
- Don't forget to back up your template again.

Page view counts will be a useful information not only for the visitors but for blog authors also to verify the response to the post. For example, to compare the number of vies to the number of comments on a page or to gain an insight to what type of topics are preferred by the visitors etc.

With really good content, page view counter will ultimately become a significant measuring tool for bloggers.