One very well received new feature of our new design here was the “Favorites” section that I setup in our sidebar. Basically, it is a part of our blog where we selected our favorite articles that were no longer in plain view for our readers and made them more easily accessible.

Before I redesigned Blogussion, I wrote a little about this idea of creating a favorite post section in my article with tips on how to drive traffic to old posts. Some people really liked the idea, and I loved the idea myself – so I implemented it here.

I really think this is just an amazing way to keep old posts into circulation, and it has proven itself to do so. The two major effects we have seen so far from posts listed on this page are:

• Posts on this page have received more views and comments
• Their activity on social networking sites such as StumbleUpon was up from before this page was created

Charts are always a great way to back statements up, and here is a screenshot from Analytics for posts with the highest pageviews this week:

Posts buried pages back are now within the top 5 most viewed posts for the week

I hope that the above is motivation enough for you to follow this tutorial and implement this idea onto your blog. This is a really great way to put the spotlight back onto old posts. Now, I’m going to teach you how exactly to do it! It’s a pretty simple thing to setup really, so it shouldn’t take you very long. Alright, let’s get started!

Step 1: Create a Category

I told you this was going to be easy. For step one, all you need to do is create a category! Call it something like “Favorites.” This category is the key to setting up your favorite posts section on your blog.

Once you have setup this category, it’s time for you to start populating it with posts. So, what you need to do now is go through your articles and pick out your favorite ones. Once you find your favorite posts, just add them to your “Favorites” category.

This process may sound tedious, especially if you have almost 250 posts like we did (I love bragging). But, oddly enough I found it rather enjoyable to go through all of the old posts on this blog and pick out the best of the best.

Step 2: Downloading the “Latest Posts by Category” Plugin

I chose to use a plugin by a blogger I respect a lot, Alex Cristache from Blogsessive. I use his plugin both here on Blogussion, and my other blog Asnio. It’s a super plugin, and makes setting something like a favorite posts section in your sidebar super easy!

Just click the awesome box below to go over to Blogsessive page and download it real quick. Don’t forget to come back now!

Setting the plugin up is easy, and lucky for all of us Alex has written a highly detailed instruction manual for using the plugin. Don’t forget to check that out in the plugin folder included in the download.

Step 3: Setting the Plugin up

If you have a widgetized sidebar, then you can simply throw in the widget wherever you want. If you don’t use widgetized sidebars, I recommend you read the documentation over at Blogsessive so you can find all of the codes for inserting this manually.

Configuring the Widget Options

Lucky for those of us with widgets, customizing the output of this plugin is as simple as checking a few boxes.

In your Widgets panel, you will find all of the options for customizing this widget. But, the one important thing that you do is select your “Favorites” category under the Categories to display: section in the options.

Now that you have checked the box and saved the settings, you should see the list of your favorite posts on your blog. Like I said, there are many other options you may want to check out to make the best use of this plugin.

A great thing about this plugin is that it leaves plenty of room for customization. By default, you just have a simple list of these posts. But, with a little CSS you can make the output look great. I’ll share with you a few tricks I did to make my list look so great here.

Again, I highly recommend you read the documentation Alex wrote so you can get the full idea of how this plugin woks.

Can now hold more content with less scrolling

Splitting the list into two columns

All it takes to split these posts into multiple columns is a little CSS. Lucky for us, this plugin comes with its very own class names which makes styling it extremely easy. Alex really thought of everything when he created this plugin, I’ll tell you that much!

So to split these lists into columns, open up your stylesheet (usually style.css) and add the following lines of CSS in there:

li.lpbcWidgetPost {
	float: left;
	padding: 0 0 1em 1em;	/* adds spacing to the right and bottom of each item */
	width: 45%;		/* will probably need adjusting depending on the width of its parent */
}

Now, this is the part where I think I will lose some people – so don’t be afraid to ask me any questions about this in the comments section.

But basically the whole idea is to float all of the content within the <li> tag to the left, which will then align everything horizontally rather than vertically. You add a little padding to separate the content, and add a width so you can limit how many posts show per line. You can decrease this width so you can have three or more columns if you wish.

Thesis Users: Add Special Styling to your “Favorites” page

As you can see, the formatting at the top of our favorite posts page has a different formatting at the top then the rest of the category pages here have. I added these extra things to that page so people who visit it knew what kind of content was there.

Luckily this is very easy to change around and if you use the wonderful Thesis Framework, all you need to do is add a little code to your custom_functions.php file:

function custom_archive_info() { if (is_category('favorites')) { ?>
 <div>
 <div>
 <h1><?php single_cat_title(); ?></h1>
 </div>
 <div>
 <!-- CONTENT HERE -->
 </div>
 </div>
<?php }
else
 thesis_default_archive_info();
}
remove_action('thesis_hook_archive_info', 'thesis_default_archive_info');
add_action('thesis_hook_archive_info', 'custom_archive_info');

Code used from Sugarrae’s tutorial

Hoping for Similar Results

This technique has worked pretty well for us so far, and I would love to know what you guys think of it as well! I do hope that this was an easy tutorial to follow, and I am trying to improve my tutorial writing skills since the last one I wrote about how to create the orange RSS box we have here.

Good luck, and let us know how this technique has effected the traffic to old posts on your blog!

Related posts:

1. Looking Back into the Past – 20 of my Favorite Articles on Blogussion

2. Very Straightforward Methods to Draw Traffic Back to Old Posts

3. Tutorial: Create a Very Informative Archives Page