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.
Related posts:
I've been using this for a while too. They crawl your site and use your tags to create the “related links”. Notice as well when you click, you are actually being redirected from LinkWithin's servers back to yours. I find the this helpful when watching my stats – as it shows referrals from my own blog. Good way to keep track on if folks are actually clicking to read similar stories…
You can email support they can make customizations for you.
I actually hadn't noticed the redirect through their own site. Interesting observation. (and thanks for the comment!)
you dont have to make a new download and installation for a differente number os posts to display,… just re-use the initial form
you dont have to make a new download and installation for a differente number os posts to display,… just re-use the initial form