An example for this top10 approach you will find on the weather site.
As a variation to existing top10 lists, I wrote a small program (in C) which reads dayfile.txt from Cumulus once per day just after midnight and for selected measurements it creates a sorted top10-list. From that list it creates a HTML-table and writes that to a text-file. That file can be included by the user on a website wherever he wants simply by a PHP-include (which is the easy way to include I think).