LinkWithin: A Prettier and Smarter Way to Feature Related Stories on Your Blog
Most blogging platforms now feature a number of third-party plugins that can display a list of related stories on your blog, or even on other blogs on the Internet. Typically, these plugins will look at how a story was tagged and then display a short list of similar stories that use the same keywords. LinkWithin is the newest contender in this market. The plugin looks at tags, but it also analyzes other factors like relevancy, popularity, and recency. Unlike similar plugins, however, LinkWithin doesn't just display a list of headlines underneath each post, but also a thumbnail with a picture from each post, which makes it far more attractive than most of its competitors.
The plugin is available for Wordpress, Typepad, and Blogger, though LinkWithin will also provide you with a code snippet that you can use on other blogging platforms. We assume that LinkWithin does some semantic analysis in the background in order to arrive at its list of related stories, though we weren't able to track down any details.
In testing LinkWithin on our own WordPress blog, the suggested posts were always spot-on, but obviously, your mileage may vary.
A Few Caveats
Because LinkWithin does most of the computing on its own servers, it can take a little while before its results appear on your blog (usually around one hour). The plugin also doesn't play nice with every theme, though the team promises to fix any problem you might encounter within a few hours after you contact them.
Verdict
LinkWithin is still a bit rough around the edges. It would be great, for example, if you could actually customize how the related items are displayed on your blog. For now, you are restricted to showing three related stories, for example, and the related stories will appear on both your homepage and on individual posts.
If you are looking for a different way to showcase more of your blogposts on your blog, however, LinkWithin is definitely worth a try.
Thanks to Marjolein Hoekstra (@cleverclogs) for telling us about this new service.
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
i think i will be reluctant to have any strager cde on my blog. so probably it good to have some power over what kind related content that will be appear on my blog.
hopefully it can only work when i'm login in to my blog. then i can see the list of related post suggstion and then i can pick as many as i want.
:D sorri form my english, i'm indonesian by the way
Hi,
I had Linkwithin on my blog and it appears to have disappeared, checking it out their site, it seems that their servers have gone down. Shame.
linkwithin çok güzel ancak benim bloğumda bazı sorunlar var.
1. bazı yazıların altında neden resim yerine, sadece yazı linki sıralanıyor.
2.birbiriyle alakasız yazılara bağlantı verilmiş.
3.hep aynı yazıların bağlantıları verilmiş.
lütfen yardım.
I'm currently testing LinkWithin on my website.
I didn't want it to display on the homepage so I edited the plugin code slightly.
Obviously this isn't the ideal solution, particularly for auto-updates of the plugin, but it does the trick for now.
To do the same thing on hosted wordpress - go to plugins/editor/linkwithin
scroll down until you see the lines
function linkwithin_add_hook($content) {
if (!is_page()) {
and swap (!is_page()) { to (is_single()) {
so it looks like this:
function linkwithin_add_hook($content) {
if (is_single()) {
the original code would add the hook for LinkWithin on anything that isn't a page - so it would show the related posts on the homepage, single post pages etc.
my mod calls the code only on single post pages.
hope that helps.
Thanks for the code, Rachel. I've been looking for a way to do this for such a long time! :)
Nice Link with in... no waste of old topic blogs
I'm loving the linkwithin plugin thus far. I just put it on my site and it looks so good!
Let's hope and pray it brings more pageviews from people cliking around.
thank you rachel! that worked perfectly.
Hello,
Thank you for the tip. LinkWithin is actually very practical and its outcome is excellent.
However, I insert images in my old posts so that they could appear in LinkWithin, but the FeedBurner continues presenting the posts without pictures.
You know tell me how do I get the feedburner update the images in old posts, and so the images can appear in LinkWithin?
Thanks again.
Murilo
This is exactly what I was trying to do myself on blogger and couldn't figure out how. Now my prior posts are automatically linked to more current ones giving the reader the option to explore more posts. Great product!
my link within plugin not working on blog www.snetdownloads.com help me
www.readwriteweb.com这个网站很好！
Hi!
I've discovered LinkWithin some weeks ago and found it very interesting. It's the best way I've seen to show related posts.
I have 2 comments about your veredict:
1. In Blogger, it's possible to show LinkWithin only in individual posts making a little modification in template code, after inserting the widget:
2. It's also possible to show 4 stories, like I did in my blogs www.tdseries.com.br and www.gerenciandoblog.com.br. You just need to e-mail support@linkwithin.com, informing your URL and asking for 4 links.
Great tool to enhance your blog. Thumbs up to "LinkWithin" Team.
The new version, gives you an option to tick to show only on single posts.
This is for the wordpress version by the way, so the above modifications aren't needed as described in the comments.
Another thing that annoys me, is that once you have set the amount of articles you want to show, there isn't real easy way of going back to change it, you need to resubmit as a 'new' blog install.
Another thing is the placement, now even though I only called the 'div' on single post and unticked the option to show only on single posts it should therefore only rely on the div you've inserted manually, however this is not case, it still shows in other pages too even if you haven't inserted the code.
Still a great plugin though, I still don't know what it would do if an article does not have an image to use for the thumbnail, their website doesn't provide much documentation.
I had LinkWithin working perfectly in my self-hosted WordPress site. Initially, the widgets are showing in my homepage but after doing the tweak posted by Rachel, LinkWithin showed on my single pages only. Thanks for the tip.
the only problem with LinkWithin thar the widget increases the bounce rate because it redirects posts from LinkWithin site.
I have used this on my site. It is really superb and very easy to install. I just uploaded plugin on my own hosted wordpress site, which was downloaded from Linkedin.
it looks very beautifull on the site.
LinkWithin working perfectly in my Blogger blog and slightly increases page impressions. It also giving my readers the option to explore many old posts that normally almost never get reached from other way (i.e because it has low rank in SERP).
Ok, regarding my comment above...I think I just figured it out. That would be a good feature ( I don't have 3 stories yet). Thanks!!!
I installed linkwithin in my blog. Its displaying entries. Almost all the posts in my blog is having images. But they are not displayed.
Also I don't think the algorithm is good.
great tool, I loved the functionality. simple easy and effective, we recommend.
It is amazing. It gives much better option to view old pages. It was very simple to install on blogger. I used it on my
Home and garden blog.
Thanks