How to pinpoint popular puzzles...
When a featured puzzle is selected, the date and puzzle ID# are added to a database. Plenty of other information could be added, but that's all we're interested in.
Once that has been done, all we need to do is use a simple script to interrogate the database and find out how many records correspond to each id#.
Then we use these values to create the parameters for the flash file embedded on the page.