Blogger most popular posts widget - the good and the bad

A week or so ago I added the Spotplex Most Popular Posts widget to my blog - you can see it in the side bar.

I thought I'd do a quick assessment of how it's running - the good and the bad.

First of all, speed. It's speedy. I've noticed no slow-down in loading time of my blog having added the widget. This is a good thing. My last Popular Posts widget (AffiliateBrand) was slowing down my blog so much I had to remove it.

Look and feel - it's OK, although I'd like to change the styling of the number of readers and the links within the widget. As it's generated via a piece of JavaScript embedded in my blog, I'm not able to do this, as the widget has its own styling that I haven't been able to figure out how to override in my own stylesheet. If anyone knows how to do that, I'd love to find out!

Article count - this is not good. For some reason, and I have no idea why, Spotplex thinks I only have 30 posts on my blog, and it's only scoring these 30 posts, rather than the 250 posts I actually have. This is annoying, because I've got a few older posts that continue to be read on a regular basis (my SiteMeter stats tell me so), but these aren't appearing in my most popular list. I'm pretty sure the 30 posts it's counting are the 30 most recent (from the last 6 months or so), and there seems to be no way of getting Spotplex to do a recount and include all my posts in the list.

I've emailed the Spotplex crew, but I've had no reply to my email, which is also annoying. What's the point of having a Most Popular Posts list if it doesn't count all your posts?

*sigh*

Apart from AffiliateBrand, this is the only popular posts widget I've found that works in Blogger, so I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. Either my blog loads so slowly I lose my visitors before they arrive, or I only have 30 out of 250 posts ranked.

Does anyone know how to get Spotplex to count all my posts, or do you know of any other Blogger most popular posts widgets out there? I'd really like to get one that works properly...

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