Okay this one has to a quickie, cause I ought not to be in front of my terminal right now but sitting adjacent to it.
Suggesting your blog readers additional post to read from your blog, that are similar to the ones they are currently reading would be a nice way to constructively engage your readers. If you are a Wordpress user, then it, I believe, is pretty simple. For those of us using Blogspot, we had to get down & dirty playing around with CSS & HTML to enable it – no longer.
LinkWithin is a nifty widget that allows you to show your readers posts that are similar to the ones they are viewing. Just enter a few details & on clicking on the Get widget button you shall be provided the simple instructions to add the widget. On doing so – voila!! related posts for your blog are enabled.
This widget can also be used for other blogging platforms [so they say – haven’t checked]. The relevancy of the post they have been suggesting for my blog is actually pretty decent – some irrelevancy here and there but overall I’ve had nothing to complain up till now [45 minutes to be precise] . Probably higher post count would display better relevancy – I have 129 in this blog [not counting this]. They also say relevancy would improve with time – lets see.
I would have preferred a plain text URL-based suggested list, as opposed to the thumbnail-based one they provide. Also the widget appears not to be centered along my blog post [adding the div align tag too did not work]. Page loading time appears to have increased noticeably, but not alarmingly I feel. Will write to them with my suggestions & feedbacks.
Do give it a try – looks pretty effective to me.
Note: clicking on the thumbnail takes you to an outside link before re-directing back immediately to the post whose thumbnail you clicked on – did a quick Google – nobody seems to have raised an alarm – so I guess its okay.
Godspeed