Friday, May 9, 2008

Show Related Articles in Blogger Posts

Apparently Wordpress can handle showing links to related posts in articles pretty easily, but this feature isn't intrinsically built into Blogger. This is a minor nuisance for ol' Greasy PC as we continue to bring you daily tips and tweaks, our total number of articles soon approaching 150 (aka five months of straight service!)

Luckily, there's a trick to getting a similar result in Blogger featured in the blog Hoctro's Place, and enhanced by Jackbook. It works by displaying a set number of articles that share the current article's tag, and displaying them.

Check out the post in Jackbook for full instructions on how to install into your blog; their version is the easiest to install (I highly suggest copying and pasting from the .txt document they link to that's got the proper formatting of the XML code you'll need to use). Meanwhile, I suggest going to the Hoctro post to read more about what options can be configured, like the maximum number of labels displayed, and maximum number of posts per label.

I wish there was a way to combine the links all into one. Even better, I wish it could display related articles in order of relevancy depending on how many tags they share with the other articles. Alas, this seems to be the best option right now for directing Blogger readers to other related articles, so we'll just make do for now. Of course, if you do find something better, don't forget to let me know!

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Widget by Hoctro | Jack Book

1 comment:

Hoc Tro Viet said...

Hi, this is Hoctro. I hear your good comment about not having the label names, just links.

I'm revamping the widget.

The second request about related "weight" is great too. I will be thinking about how to implement it.

cheers,

Hoctro