Simple, no baggage

Hi,

Thank you for the 5-star review and your detailed explanation on the features. One thing I can tell you is that the related posts that this plugin will always be about YOU and not about advertisers and pushing links to any site other than your own!
What’s the point of a related post if it isn’t going to help user retention?

I’m curious as to understand what you found wonky in the plugin. As always am happy to fix and improve my plugin constantly

Hey, Ajay. Thanks for your interest.

What was wonky? Well, I have a site based on a heavily modified TwentyFourteen theme. I originally wanted to include the excerpt with the link, but the text always seemed to wrap around the thumbnail in a way I thought ugly. No doubt there is a CSS fix, but I wasn’t in the mood to spend time on that. I ended up just using the title, and am now I’m glad I did, as I think it will generate more click-throughs anyway.

You can see the result at: https://hiddentrenton.com

My only other complaint with the plugin is the way you handle “related posts should be newer than”. I don’t age out my posts (they’re reviews and I update them as needed). I originally figured that if I didn’t want to age out a post, I could enter a 0 there (or perhaps I left it blank). Instead, I got NO posts. So I entered a big number, and it’s fine. I don’t consider this “wonky” just slightly inconsistent, as you use the “0” convention elsewhere, e.g. “Limit content to be compared”.

Hi, on the first point, you’re right it would be a CSS fix. Potentially, a float:left for the thumbnail.

On the second, using 0 is actually a good idea that I didn’t think of. I’ll put that in my list of things to add.

Ajay…

I’m glad you think “0” it’s a good way to specify unlimited timing on related posts.

While we’re fantasizing, let me suggest two other features that I think would be very useful:

1. Being able to specify related posts on a “per post” basis. You’re already allowing users to specify a custom thumbnail per post. This would just be an optional list of post ids that should be included with the related posts per post.
2. Similarly, excluding related posts on a “per post” basis. You’re already doing this globally. This would be an optional list at the individual post level.

Anyway, what you’re doing now is extremely useful. This would just make it perfect. Thanks again.

I can understand option 2. But, if you’ve got option 1 in place, then doesn’t it beat the point of being related?

Not quite sure what your objection is, Ajay. Here’s what I mean by option 1. Let’s say I’ve set max number of related posts to 3. Sometimes your algorithm may NOT automatically select (in the top 3, anyway) a post I particularly want related to a post I’ve just added. Option 1 allows me to specify it (with your plugin filling in the next 2).

Also, it sets ordering (any manually selected related posts would show up at the top of the list of related links). So I might do it simply to shift a given related post to the top of the list.

BTW, there used to be a popular plugin that worked this way exclusively. It provided a little UI to select other posts, and then displayed only the posts you selected. I’m suggesting this as a supplement to the automatic selection that you currently do. Of course, if I’m limiting related links to 3, and I specify 3 related posts manually, your auto-selection algorithm doesn’t need to get involved for THAT post.

Does this make sense?

Not an objection, but adds something that clearly goes beyond the realm of related.

It’s something that in theory can still be done with the current plugin, albeit not on a per post basis.

Interestingly, it’s also something many users have been asking for, which would make sense to put on the roadmap!

Ajay, think like a customer!

From my point of view, I don’t care at all about “relatedness” in a theoretical sense, except that I hope you’ve done a good job creating the algorithm so that, in most cases, the links your plugin generates are helpful to my users. (And in no cases is non-sensical).

However well you do this, it’s never going to be perfect. I might have a post that says the chef of this restaurant used to work at Joe’s Italian Restaurant, but now has gone out on his own to start this wonderful Afghan restaurant. Hypothetically, I might want this to match other Middle Eastern restaurants (which might be categorized Greek or Israeli, and therefore don’t seem to match Afghan). So your algorithm might match Joe’s italian, plus other Italian restaurants, and miss the middle eastern connection altogether.

In this case the “relatedness” is triggered by the nature of cuisine (ie. the knowledge that middle eastern cuisine spans Afghan, Israel, and Greek cooking) not in the language. Your plugin will never make semantic connections like that. That’s why your customers want the option to override.