7 How to show links to related posts Saturday, September 15, 2007 /

Over at Hoctro's Place, I found a great hack which can help you show links to related posts (by label) beside each of your blog posts (in the sidebar section). This can be a very useful hack because many visitors to your blog will land on a "post page" rather than on your home page, and these links can direct them to other posts of interest on your blog.

This hack uses the JSON Callback technique to retrieve post titles from your blog's labels feed. Also, the inclusion of more than one label set is possible, so if you have more than one label for a post, related titles will displayed for each of these labels.

You can choose the maximum number of labels to display as well as the maximum number of posts for each label, which is handy if you feature a great many posts under one particular label.

Hoctro's instructions for this hack are very good, and take you through the modifications to your template step-by-step. It is advisable to pay close attention to the instructions though as the modifications are quite extensive!

For the full tutorial, please visit the "Showing Related Articles" tutorial over at Hoctro's blog.

Although I don't currently feature this hack here on Blogger Buster, I will certainly make use of this when my template is upgraded in the next few weeks! I will also look into the possibility of featuring the related posts links right beneath each post instead of in the sidebar, which I will post as tutorial once I am more sure of how this can be achieved.

Technorati Tags: related+posts | javascript | widget | labels | feeds