Plugins for WordPress Guest Post by Erica Mueller

Title: Related Post Plugins for WordPress by Erica Mueller

Somewhere along this ever evolving social world we know as blogging, someone realized there was a need to promote older posts, and that this needed to be something easy for the blogger to do. I don’t know who started it, but I know the idea caught on and we now have several options to promote related posts on our blog.

The most famous of these is Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, or YARRP. I used this plugin for a while, and I liked it enough that I just never looked further. I set it up, and let it run… till it stopped. Now, I realize this could be a user problem, or just my site, but when YARRP went down, I realized I’d need something to replace it. I did a little research on YARRP and found people complaining that it used a lot of resources. Some people even claimed their hosts threatened to shut down their sites is YARRP wasn’t turned off. It was then I learned that this little piece of code YARRP inserts at the bottom of each post is very dynamic. Now, this is usually a good thing, and in this case, it could be… each time a post is loaded in a reader’s browser, this code goes to work finding relevant posts. Sounds cool, right? The problem is when you have a lot of traffic, that’s a lot of resources being used.

Next on the list of popular related post plugins is LinkWithin. Because I’d just learned about the problems with YARRP and heavy traffic I decided to check this one out as well. Same problem, only worse. In this case, the plugin actually communicates with an off-site tool. This tool goes down, so does the LinkWithin function on your blog. Because this thing isn’t entirely hosted by your site, it’s using even more resources to fetch information. Not to mention, it uses photos. LinkWithin is pretty. It’s a visual related post plugin. I like it. I get why others do. But, it’s a hog when it comes to resources.

And so, my search continued until I found Microkid’s Related Post Plugin. This plugin actually lets you, the writer, pick which posts to show at the end of your current post. You do a real quick search for a word or term (title, content, or both) and it immediately (thanks to ajax) shows you relevant posts which you can then select. Because these links are static, there is no searching and fetching going on when you post is loaded. And, it takes the randomized, may not be as relevant as you’d hoped, links the others would have generated, and tosses them out the window. For a niche blogger like me, this is very handy. I want to have that control. In my opinion, Microkid’s Related Posts plugin is the best out there.

Here’s a short video clip to show you just how quick and easy it is to find and add related posts!

Newer posting on WordPress Plugins May 31, 2011

______________________________________

Eileen Lud­wig of Social Media School brings to the world decades of com­puter expe­ri­ence with a desire to learn and share cur­rent tech­nol­ogy mul­ti­me­dia tools for com­mu­ni­ca­tion. She is owner of four sites: Free­lance­Tourist , Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy, Web Design School, and Social Media School Each are in dif­fer­ent stages of devel­op­ment and evolution.

• Twit­ter
• Web­site
• Face­book