The announcement hasn’t hit my inbox yet, but I just noticed a wonderful new feature from WordPress — related posts at the bottom of each of our posts, complete with thumbnails if we enable them.
The feature, with or without thumbnails, can be turned on or off on your Dashboard under Settings > Reading. It’s on by default, so you may already have noticed it.
It remains to be seen how well the algorithm for finding related posts will work. Similar algorithms in the past have had mixed results. Zemanta seems to work pretty well, but we have the important option of choosing which if any of the suggested posts to include. Perhaps WP will want to incorporate something like this.
I’ve also suggested that WP let us turn the heading “Related” off or change it to something more general like “Also on this blog” to accommodate posts that might not be related. Or perhaps give us the option of making up our own heading.
In any case, I think it’s a great new feature. It was included in a new theme several months ago and I almost changed themes just to get it. Now we can all have it without changing themes. Thanks, WP!
Pretty cool – thanks for the heads up
Thanks for the update. They also need to allow users to change their own comments and unsubscribe from blogs to which they’ve subscribed. Currently, you have to ask WordPress to unsubscribe you. And a like button on comments would be nice.
I agree we should have a chance to edit/correct our own comments, even if only during a 5-minute window. (I always spot my errors 2 seconds after I click “Post”!)
You can unsubscribe from any blog you’ve subscribed to. The easiest way is to click “Following” in your admin bar while you’re on that blog (it will change to “Unfollow” when you mouse over it). Or in your Reader, click on “Blogs I Follow” in the right sidebar and then click the X next to the blog you want to stop following.
I’d never thought about a Like button on comments. Sounds like a good way to encourage thoughtful, well-written comments.
I meant -for those folks who signed up with only an email, there is no other way to unfollow. Sorry should have clarified.
Hmm, hadn’t thought about those. Is there a line at the bottom of the email with a link that you can click to unsubscribe? A lot of websites do that.
One simply clicks the “unsubscribe” link on the very bottom of the next post they receove by email.
They introduced something similar a few years ago, but it didn’t last… at least not in the format it was introduced in. I wrote something about my brother being at the White House on 9/11, and watching the plane that hit the Pentagon fly over while he was on the phone with my mother, and a “related post” came up under my post about gardening. I think the headline was something like “Fun things to do with in the garden with rubber boots”.
Just to clarify: the ‘gardening post’ was from another blog…. I think the difference might be, in the original format, it was other people’s blog posts that were listed as “related”, but this one allows your blog posts to be posted instead..?
So far I’ve only seen “relateds” pulled from my own blog, which is good. Except they aren’t necessarily related. That head needs to be changed to something more general like “You might also enjoy …”
I remember some of those old “related” posts. They were from all over the Internet and included some really undesirable stuff.
The announcement has been made here http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/related/
Thanks, tt. I found that after first noticing the related posts. Oddly enough, I never got the email announcement (I’m subscribed to WP News).
I like the Related Posts Option (I noticed it and I enabled it even before they first announced it), and I hope that other Zemanta-like features are added in the future; and thank you sharing this post about it PiedType. 🙂
-John Jr