by Mangerpola » Tue Mar 02, 2010 6:22 am
Since you haven't specified what sort of development environment you have, such as programming language, database server, etc., I can only provide a fairly generic answer.
Each time an article is displayed, you would update a counter in a database. Each time your links page is displayed, you would select 5 articles from the database ordered by article display count and generate the appropriate HTML links.
You might elaborate on that scheme by updating the article view count in the database for the current date, so you could select records by popularity within a specific date ranges, eg 'today', 'this week', 'all time'.