Related posts with the LinkWithin plugin

I’ve long been a fan of “related posts” plugins for any blog – they help hook your readers in by providing a logical and hopefully relevant next step deeper into your site. I’ve also long been a fan of effective use of images in a blog to keep things visually interesting. So how about combining the two?

Enter the LinkWithin plugin, which I just discovered this week and have been playing with on a couple of sites. It’s simple yet effective – it creates a list of related posts with autogenerated thumbnails of an image within each post. You can see the results in the image above (or, for now, below this post).

Pros: Very clean and simple, no frills, seems to create relevant posts.
Cons: So simple, there are no real customization or admin options. As far as I can tell, if you want to change the # of posts displayed you need to do a complete re-download and install of the plugin as the options appear to be custom set at download.

If you tend to include an image in each post, and are looking for a new take on displaying relevant posts, consider giving this one a try.