Blogger: Related Posts Widget

There are different methods to list related posts in blogger. I have tried several of them and after reviewing, I think Yu-Jie Lin's blogger related posts is the best for several reasons. It is very fast and updates from feed once a day. Installation is very fast and can be done by installing the widget from Yu-Jie's blogger related post service and adding a code to your blogger template. However, you might want to consider hosting on your own, in order to have your own dedicated find related posts service. This can be setup for free using google low latency content delivery network (CDN), with some basic knowledge of python in about 10 minutes. In this article I explain how.

Introduction

A related post widget is very useful in order to reduce bounce rate and keep people on your blog exploring one or several topics. There is no related posts widget from blogger, however many people have developed their own related posts widget.

Some of these related posts widgets are very good, however they suffer from one or several of the following limitations:

• very intricate installation procedure
• high server latency - because your visitors need to contact some servers somewhere far away from them
• syncronization - update is not frequent enough, so that after a week you still see deleted posts listed under related posts, while other new ones are not listed
• speed - some take big or convoluted javascript that takes too long to download and execute
• duplication - Within the listed 3 posts, two are identical.
• relevance - You don't know how they calculate which posts are related (lack of transparency). Sometimes the choice can be quite arbitrary.

Y-Jie's related posts widget has none of these problems. Aside from being very responsive, fast, and low latency, it has following characteristics:

• Relevance is based on labels of queried post
• Allows customization of widget title
• Fast and easy setup: 3 Lines only for manual installation
• High update frequency: data cache for 24 hours
• Lists up to 10 related posts

Problem however is that already many people use Yu-Jie's service at his setup, he is going to run into trouble. There are quota for appengine and he is already at the limit of the quota.

In the next section I explain how you do your own setup for free and in less than 30 minutes. If I can't convince you how easy it is, you can still use Yu-Jie's setup at http://brps.appspot.com or possibly mine at http://findrelatedposts.appspot.com. If you like it, please, as a matter of courtesy, put a link to Yu-Jie's page. This way other people also get to know about this related post widget.

How to Setup Related Posts on Google App Engine

Hosting on your own, can be useful in order to reduce server load and to get highly responsive scripts. If you want really fast responses you would want to host your own related post server. You can of course use any server that supports python. For google app engine you need an appengine account, which is free and takes only about 5 minutes for registration. Here I explain how to deploy your application to the google app engine, however most of the instructions are generic.

Installation walkthrough:

• Register at google app engine and claim a subdomain, which is not brps (Yu-Jie's) or findrelatedposts (mine).
• Download the google app engine SDK (you also need python installed).
• Download the application files from brps project page:
  hg clone https://brps.googlecode.com/hg/ brps
• Change the application ID from brps to [YourID] in app.yaml
• Change brps.appspot.com to [YourID].appspot.com in brps.js and in all python scripts (optionally some HTML templates under template)
• in python, where it loads simplejson, change the lines so that it says:
  from django.utils import simplejson as json
• Deploy your new application. From the brps source directory, type:
  appcfg update .

The code is released under the GPLv3 license. Remember that you should release your source code if you make any changes. This helps everyone to profit.

If you are interested in other ways to make your webpage or blog faster, please read my article speed up loading of website and blog.