My Most Helpful and Least Helpful Blog Posts: June through September 2009

Back in early June, I wrote up a quick blog post describing how I setup my Did you Find this Helpful? widget.  The goal of this widget was to determine which blog posts my readers found most helpful, and least helpful.  As described, I used a little JavaScript (jQuery driven of course) to log the request with Apache via AJAX.  The yes or no responses from readers are cached in my Apache log files, which let me run reports on these logs to see which of my posts are most helpful, and least helpful:

192.168.1.1 - - [05/Jun/2009:09:03:07 -0700] \
   "GET /tracker/Helpful/yes/?http%3A%2F%2Fmark.koli.ch%2F2009%2... \
   HTTP/1.1" 204 - "http://mark.koli.ch/2009/05/..." \
   "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) \
      Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"

Since June I've been collecting "Did you find this helpful?" responses, and finally got around to analyzing my logs to determine what is actually most helpful, and least helpful.  Here's the top 5 in each category.  Interestingly, two of the most helpful blog posts are also two of the least helpful.  I guess you can't please everyone:


Top 5 Most Helpful

1. JAVA: Resolving org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Content is not allowed in prolog
2. HOWTO: Whole Disk Backup and Recovery with dd, gzip, and p7zip (Linux on a CD too)
3. Symantec AntiVirus: HOWTO Disable/Unlock Scheduled Administrator Scans
4. Using the Twitter API, Cache Your 'Tweets' in PHP (TwitterCacher)
5. Understanding Java's "Perm Gen" (MaxPermSize, heap space, etc.)

Complete list September 2009 Most Helpful blog posts.


Top 5 Least Helpful

1. HOWTO: Make Your Own AddThis Social Bookmarking Sharing Widget (Sharing URLs)
2. Understanding Java's "Perm Gen" (MaxPermSize, heap space, etc.)
3. Java to Capitalize the First Letter of Each Word in a Sentence
4. ImageMagick and PHP: Your Best Friend Or Your Worst Nightmare (Installing and a Few Examples)
5. JAVA: Resolving org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Content is not allowed in prolog

Complete list September 2009 Least Helpful blog posts.