Celeste - Shareaholic

Hi mandielew,

I ran a reprocessing of the images used in your recommendations. It looks like there were six where an image was not generated, but this has now been fixed. You should see the results on your site within an hour. Make sure you empty all caching before you check.

Just in case you happen to run into a problem like this again, you can refresh the data we have indexed quite easily from within your plugin settings panel. This article will provide you with more information.

If you need additional help with the plugin, please feel free to contact us directly by submitting a request through our support center so that we can speak with you one-on-one. Thanks!

Hey again, Mercelo ??

Good observation! At this time, Related Content is optimized for English-language sites, but this is one of the aspects we wish to expand as development continues.

If you would like to contact us directly through our support center with an account of what you’ve observed on your sites, some suggestions of how you’d like to see this feature improved including examples, and any other feedback you have to offer in regards to Related Content, we’d love to hear from you! And I’ll make sure your email is also forwarded to the engineer who works on this aspect of the product.

Related Content is an active project that we work on daily, so expect many advancements through the coming year and beyond. We are striving to make this feature the best available and have greatly improved functionality–leaps and bounds–over just the past couple months since this version, which was built entirely from scratch, was released.

This isn’t a project we will be neglecting or abandoning. It’s high priority, and we look forward to delivering the most amazing related content feature around. Stay tuned!

Hi! I just ran across this thread when sifting through old cases. The best way to get a hold of us quickly is by submitting a request through our support center. This will also allow you to receive personalized help.

Now, onto the questions.

How Related Content works:

First, when our plugin is installed on your site, our server attempts to index the pages of your site by checking for an XML sitemap and retrieving the URLs from this list, passing them into our processing queue to be crawled as individual pages.

When the pages are crawled, we extract various pieces of data that are used in calculating the relationship of one page to another. Meta tags are definitely useful to provide more information about your content.

We have continued to work on the intelligence portion of this app so as to improve the calculated relationship between pages. This is a complicated coding process, so I am unable to provide specific details in how the machine learns, but it is the backbone to the Related Content app.

Once we have data for each page, a file is generated to summarize a list of pages so that it can be passed along to the recommendations engine, which handles the delivery of your recommendations. The app is a very complex network of systems that work together to produce this feature, and it will continue to improve as we further refine the code.

There are additional aspects that aren’t explained above, but this is generally how Related Content works at this time.

If you are having trouble with images, you might just need to refresh your page data in our system. Here’s an article with information on how you can do this independently from your settings panel.

And if you have any additional questions, concerns or issues that haven’t yet been resolved, please do submit a request through our support center with your website address, a description of the problem, and any steps you have taken to try and resolve it independently. Thanks so much and happy holidays!

Hi pikkabbu,

Are you still receiving an error message? Could you please check if you have another instance of Shareaholic inactive in your list of plugins? If you have Shareaholic v6 deactivated in your list, remove (delete) the v6 plugin to see if this resolves the problem for you.

If you are still having trouble, please contact us directly through our support center with your website address and a link to this forum thread for reference, and we’ll be happy to troubleshoot with you. Thanks!

Hi Jacob,

We performed a refresh of the page data for hollandstivers.net yesterday. If you would like to manage this in the future, there is a button on the General Website Settings page that you can press to re-crawl all pages we have indexed for a site. Here’s an article with more information.

If you find that the refresh yesterday did not fix the recommendations and you’ve emptied all site caching and local caching before checking, please reach out to us directly through our support center with any new information and a link to this forum thread for reference, and we’ll be happy to investigate further. Thanks!

Hi Angus,

It sounds like you need to set the data-attribute for the link you’d like to share because you manually positioned the Share Buttons outside of your looped content. What happens when you do this is that the stats from the most recent post are usually detected by the app, which means that’s also the post your readers would be sharing. Now, if you would like to keep this behavior, do nothing, and the Share Buttons will dynamically pull in the link based on what’s detected on the feed page, and if they load on a permalink page, they will pull the link for the permalink, allowing your readers to share that page from the widget area.

I assume that you read the Positioning Apps Manually guide for information about using the shortcode to place apps in a widget. Near the beginning of this support article, there is information about setting data-attributes for passing information into the app if you’d like to do so.

As for the time it takes to load the Share Buttons, you’ll find that on individual pages, it loads pretty quickly, but usually after the rest of your page content loads. This allows your readers to start reading without having to wait for the resources to load before the page renders.

You’ll find that on your feed pages, if you have the apps enabled, it will take longer for a couple of reasons. One, there is a lot of content that loads on these pages even without our plugin, which usually includes a fair share of image files and maybe scripts and resources from other plugins. Our buttons are loading multiple times, hooking into the individual content, and just in case you also have the Related Content app enabled, because of the nature of this app, the recommendations are specific to the individual content. You’ll probably find that the apps load quicker if you were to lower the number of articles that appear on a single page in a feed.

Also, if you have share counts enabled, these numbers are being pulled directly from the servers of these services, which may cause a drag, depending on time of day and traffic levels on these servers. Disabling share counts quite often noticeably speeds up our Share Buttons app.

And don’t forget to consider caching. If you use caching plugins, this improves page load time. And for your readers, browser caching should also be considered as once the scripts have been stored locally, the apps will load much quicker on subsequent views. We personally cache our plugin resources on Amazon Webhosting Services to speed delivery. This service is used by many large technology companies for this purpose.

And yes, depending on your geographic location, you may experience delays if the data is having to travel further from server-to-server.

I hope you found this information helpful. If you have any other questions or concerns, you can contact us directly through our helpdesk by visiting our support center, and thanks so much for your support! I hope that by using some of the above suggestions, you are able to improve the load time of our apps on your site. ??

Hi Phil,

We are working on adding an option to disable the multi-share panel. However, we have been using OAuth for Twitter connection over the past couple years and haven’t found that this has had a negative impact on sharing. Actually, it has increased sharing, perhaps because of the custom interface that allows sharing to multiple accounts at once.

Authorizing our app is only necessary the first time you connect (there are many popular applications around the web that also use Twitter’s API and OAuth), and then a special key is generated for storing this setting so that there is an automatic link detected between Shareaholic and Twitter, allowing our app to share on your behalf whenever your choose to share with Twitter through our products.

Here’s an article with information about the multi-share panel (that allows you to also share with Facebook in one step), which was rolled out at the beginning of the year by popular request. I hope you find this information helpful! ??

Hi everyone,

I was just sifting through old threads and stumbled across this one. I apologize for the wait. If you haven’t submitted a request to our support center, or this issue has yet to be resolved on your site, please contact our helpdesk directly with your website address and a description of the problem so that we can assist you personally. Thanks!

Hi Roger,

The Google Analytics integration was included in the plugin by request several years ago. The settings are available on the Social Analytics page of the plugin interface along with a link to documentation explaining how it works. When setting up the plugin, this is an optional feature that can be configured in the same manner that you can configure other features available within the plugin over their categorized settings pages.

Currently, this feature is not included in our v7 redesign that was released on our other channel this summer. The sexybookmarks plugin channel will be upgraded to v7 in January, but you are free to install v7 before then if you’d like to give it a spin.

And just a snip from the documentation concerning Social Interactions:

“While event tracking can track general content interactions as well, Social Analytics provides a consistent framework for recording social interactions. This in turn provides Google Analytics report users with a consistent set of reports to compare social network interactions across multiple networks.”

This feature is harmless and actually helpful. Please, take the time to read the documentation for a better understanding. Also, you would need to include your Google Analytics Property ID into the input box on the Social Analytics settings page for it to work when enabled.

Hi Wanderer,

I apologize for the delay. I was sifting through old threads today and only just saw your response. Here’s an article I wrote yesterday that should help with your image issue in case you are still having this problem: https://support.shareaholic.com/hc/en-us/articles/201072648-How-to-Refresh-page-details

If you have any further questions, you can contact us directly through our support center by submitting a request, and we’ll be happy to assist! ??

Hi, everyone!

I’m just now seeing this thread. The quickest way to get a hold of us and speak to someone directly is by contacting us through our support center.

For everyone that listed their domain, I’ve checked the data on our end and am performing new crawls to update our data with any changes that may have caused your page data to no longer be synced with your current settings (which are stored under a unique API key).

If you upgraded from version 6, the data on our end would not have updated to reflect this change. Also, if you pressed the reset button on the Advanced Settings page, this would stop recommendations from showing on your site, because a new API key was generated at that time. These are two specific instances that cause a syncing issue with the data we have cached.

Now, after running a new crawl for the three sites listed in this thread since we last commented, check on your site in a few hours (no rush), but make sure to empty all caches before flipping through your content, and you’ll also want to check for recommendations on both older and newer content.

If you are still running into a problem with Related Content visibility, please contact us directly through our support center for personal assistance. Make sure to describe the problem, any relevant details, the URL of this forum thread, and include your website address. Thanks!

Hi softflip,

It’s been a while. I just wanted to check in on you to see if you are seeing any similar problems in our version 7 redesign.

Just in case you haven’t yet upgraded, here’s an article to help you through the transition.

Keep me posted–thanks!

Hi PhaseCreative!

As soon as I saw your review, I spoke with the team about making some modifications while we were continuing development on our newly redesigned plugin. We recently implemented some changes that should proactively address the exclusion issues you referenced. Our new data handler ingeniously provides us with more information about a page so that we can now identify when content is marked as private by WordPress.

And other than the Pages to Exclude section located under our plugin’s General Website Settings panel, we also introduced a nifty new option on the Post/Page Edit/Compose screen, allowing you to filter specific content without the need to compile a list of URLs.

This provides more options to publishers for better recommendations management and for better handling on our end to identify posts that should be automatically filtered from the recommendations’ rotation.

We hope you like the changes and appreciate that you took the time to focus our attention on this quirk. We’re very happy that we found an elegant solution and that we’ve improved data handling for all publishers. Your feedback has been invaluable, and I hope you continue to utilize and enjoy our plugin.

We still have a lot of work planned as we continue to develop and evolve our products, including Shareaholic for WordPress, but are delighted to receive input from those who are using our plugin on their site. Thanks for being awesome!

Hi st3ph3n,

If you are running Shareaholic for WordPress v7+, on the Available Apps screen, you’ll see options to disable the Related Content app in different template views. You can enable them in all available templates or disable them in all available templates or select just the templates in which you’d like recommendations to appear, such as on your posts.

Related Content is a feature of the plugin that was first introduced about 2 years ago. Similarly, you can also select where Share Buttons appear on your site through the Available Apps settings page of our plugin.

Some publishers like to just use the Share Buttons and others like to use just the Related Content feature, and then there are a large number who use both as complimentary features to encourage sharing on their site and keep their readers browsing longer, correlating with the bounce rate.

It is entirely the publisher’s decision which apps they feel are most beneficial for their site and where they’d like them to appear within their site. These settings are customizable within the Available Apps screen.

Hi Rebecca,

I’m looking at your site right now, and it appears that recommendations are displaying. Would you mind emptying your browser’s cache and refreshing your homepage to see if this fixes the problem for you? If this doesn’t work, I’ll need your web browser version and operating system details so that I can open your site in a similar environment to see if the visibility issue can be reproduced on my end. Thanks for your help!