arrange posts by facebook likes, template design tutorial

well, let me share a code i just made to resort posts.
i made a competition on my site, the user should make a post, the winner is one who gets most Facebook likes.

i had to fetch posts likes, assign the number to a custom field, then query posts sorted by the custom field value.

i start by adding a loop before the main loop, and fetch the likes count from facebook:

query_posts();
if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();
// get facebook likes
$facebook_api_results = file_get_contents("http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&format=json&urls=" . urlencode(get_permalink()));
$parsed_facebook_api_results = json_decode($facebook_api_results, true);

then i create new field and add the facebook likes count number:

$likes=$parsed_facebook_api_results[0]['total_count'];
$id=get_the_ID();
add_post_meta( $id, '_likes', $likes, true ) || update_post_meta( $id, '_likes', $likes );

then just end the loop:

endwhile;
endif;
wp_reset_query();

now modify the query posts loop to sort them according to the custom field:

query_posts('meta_key=_likes&orderby=meta_value_num&posts_per_page=3&cat=' . $mycat);
if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();

am not a coder, i just like to code 🙂