Automatically Adding Related Content to Wordpress Posts

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Writer’s Block

I woke up today with nothing to write. That usually happens when I am in research or programming mode. These modes are necessary evils but they can throw me for a loop if I stay in either one too long.

I have also seen a tiny slump in my affiliate sales in the last few weeks. It has happened before at this time of the year. Not sure if the time of the year is the reason or what, but this also throws me for a loop. Panic mode. But sales are still better than any month last year so I need to quit my whining.

So with my head brewing 50 methods a second to catch this dip in sales, I ended up chasing my own tail for a day or so and not doing anything that would. So I took a breath and went back to the plan.

The plan was that this blog was going to be an extension of what I do to make money online. It would make my thoughts clearer on the subject, allowing me to work more efficiently. It would also expose those hidden elements of making money online that involve more than selling something and cashing the check for people out there now hitting the stumbling blocks I have already run into or am currently attacking. While others were exposing the easy parts, the cut and dried, I wanted to take on the hidden land mines.

How to Add Related Content?

I have been hunting for a way to put information related to a post in it automatically. That is the basic concept. In an effort to find something that would do this for me, I had to get more specific. I ran into reblogging and the semantic web. Somewhere along the way, I forgot my original concept and started chasing the details.

I have built some internet Rube Goldberg machines in my time chasing ideas like this, hacking a few scripts together to accomplish my goal. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it crashed servers. This time I wanted to do it right and I have been on this trail for a few weeks now.

So yesterday I posted a job at a freelance board. I figured I’d let someone else chase the issue. And today I returned to my cheapskate roots and started searching.

Old School Searching

Knowing that the problem was chasing details, I started an "old school" search process. Let me explain.

If you know what you are looking for, you can use precise terms. If you are still vague about your idea, terms you can barely define will only send you in the wrong direction. So I took the terms I used as general as I could, "wordpress rss plugin" and starting wading through Google results pages. I stopped about page 27 where the results started to get further off topic. This is what I mean by "old school" searching. Before Google, I used software called Webferret to pull results from multiple search engines 500 links at a time and then started clicking links.

Of course when you do this, you can come back with more than you started looking for. But at least I found what I was looking for, a few times. I promptly went back and canceled my freelance request, which got me thinking about a quick way to make some cash if you are good at searching. The lowest bid on my project was $90. I will let you figure out the rest.

The Results

The Content Related RSS Plugin - This is a very simple plugin to add feeds to your Wordpress posts. But it uses a plugin that is no longer supported to extract terms from your post to add to the feed url. This was obviously written before tags became so widespread

Carp/WP - This one uses a separate installation of Carp to add feed items anywhere on your blog. The separate installation of Carp was an issue. I could do it, but why. Though visiting the Carp website and signing up for details was worth it. You get two free ebooks including one on using feeds to make money. This is on the list of possibles, but I kept looking.

Simple Pie Plugin for Wordpress - For this one, you have to install the Simple Pie Core plugin first, but that is better than installing a whole new piece of software. This one is so customizable I stopped there. I think it will work for me. Won’t be up and running today, but I will be adding a special post just about that.

The Extra Bonuses

Part of the benefits of beating your head against the wall by searching very generally is finding things you never knew existed and can’t live without. Well, I can live without them but these are some nice plugins for the right type of site:

ContentGen+ - Automated reblogging through a plugin with feeds.

Scheduled Post Shift - Great concept. Automatically change the dates on your posts to republish them as new ones. Have your blog look like it is still active. Not that I would use it, but the ideas people come up with.

WP-o-Matic - A more complex way to republish feeds on your Wordpress blogs.

Optimal OPML Browser - Turn your OPML file into a browsable tree on your blog.

Why All the Searching?

  • With matched feeds, I can put matched delicious bookmarks in my posts.
  • I can use Ebay feeds and their affiliate program to added related products.
  • I can do the same with Amazon.
  • Everything has feeds.
  • For those that don’t, there’s Dapper and Feedity.
  • To mix them, there’s Pipes.
  • And for other things, there is a MySql Database and Triplify.

So weird wasted searches do pay off and off I go on another Rube Goldberg machine.

Tags: Carp, feed, plugins, related content, related feeds, rss, Semantic Web, Simple Pie, Wordpress

Related posts

8 Apr, 2008  Blogging, Feeds, Search Engines, Wordpress



11 Comments so far »

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  1. JLMON said

    April 8 2008 @ 1:24 pm

    Hi Stephan
    Mi inglés es bueno….regular, así que torturaré con el castellano y así de paso te empieza a sonar.
    He empezado a leer tu blog: me gusta. Sigue!
    Como decimos en Bilbao: Agur

    JLMON’s last blog post..MEJOR HUEVO QUE HAMBURGUESA

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  2. Dennis Edell said

    April 9 2008 @ 7:14 am

    I’m tellin ya Stephan, if anyone can get someone of their butt it’s you! I barely have time to take your advice on one thing and you come out with 10 more to look at :-)

    Excellent work.

    Btw, “re-posting” old posts can really work depending on why you’re doing it. Now that I am promoting more and more, I’ve been doing it with posts that were originally ignored (by that I mean no comments) and it appears to be working well so far.

    I’m not using a plugin tho, just the built-in WP timestamp feature. This however doesn’t work with posts from a previous year…you can only change the month & date within the same year.

    Dennis Edell’s last blog post..Free Advertising At Craigslist - Press Releases

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  3. Stephan Miller said

    April 9 2008 @ 9:34 am

    Well, this last six months or so have been spent in research as well as promotion. I wanted to see how far and wide I could go with this blogging thing while mixing in my knowledge of SEO, PHP and BS. LOL. I like things in neat little rows. So I start sloppy, gathering as much information as I can. Eventually the information falls into neat little categories in my head without much input from my conscious self. A lot of that is ejecting itself onto this site right now.

    I want to start more blogs than the two active ones I have, but I want everything in order before I do: structure, promotion, getting links, and the like. That way I can run down a list to get a new blog off the ground and then just focus on writing, social networks and commenting.

    I know that there are a lot of blueprints for this out there, but I have always benefited from doing my own research. It gives a tiny little edge and sometimes a big one.

    The drop in sales has really got me on an SEO kick, so look for a series of posts that follow my new trip. It picked back up today. But I will trick myself into believing it’s a downturn just to push myself past this plateau and into the next. I will make six figures this year for the first time in my life. It may be a combo of day job and internet money, but it is still my goal to get there. Mama and Dada both need a new house in a neighborhood where cars don’t get parked on the front lawn.

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  4. Dennis Edell said

    April 9 2008 @ 11:05 am

    I most certainly look forward to these future posts :)
    Dennis Edell’s last blog post..Free Advertising At Craigslist - Press Releases

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  5. Ali Mudar said

    April 9 2008 @ 5:47 pm

    Very informative post!
    thanks for this.

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  6. Markk said

    April 10 2008 @ 1:01 am

    Hi, fancy coming to your blog and I see you’re writing about writer’s block. Coincidence, perhaps. Just did one post on the same today. Cheers.

    Markk’s last blog post..Write Crap and You’ll Overcome Writer’s Block

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  7. Tom Lindstrom said

    April 10 2008 @ 9:16 am

    A constantly updated wordpress blog automatically sounds fantastic! How about the duplicate content problem that will occur from this? Can it be avoided? Nice blog post, I have stumbled it!

    Tom Lindstrom’s last blog post..Is Your Home Business Dream Turning Into A Nightmare?

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  8. Stephan Miller said

    April 10 2008 @ 10:01 am

    Thanks Tom. I am investigating this further. The plugin is actually installed here and it works. I had my related delicious bookmarks underneath my posts for about ten minutes yesterday just to see. I am just coding some custom preprocessors for it before I make it live. I will be writing another post on it when I am done, with the code snippets you need and the whole shebang.

    I think people put too much into the duplicate content scare. I will also be writing a post on that sometime in the future. Duplicate content is a percentage thing. For example, on my category pages, I have the first so many words in each post and there are ten posts. Since there is only a paragraph from each stacked on top of each other, this is actually new content to a percentage based algorithm. Duplicate content would be having the whole post listed. This may change but for now it is safe.

    Many big name, big traffic sites only mix content from other sites, yet they still get the search engine hits. Because they know how to mix the duplicated content up enough to create “new” content. They build a page around a content “seed” and pull data from enough sites to beat the percentages.

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  9. Suzie Cheel said

    April 19 2008 @ 4:59 pm

    This is wonderful Stephen,thank you for having writers block and doing the research.this is a great resource I have so much to learn I will look at how you are using this related content plugin and look forward to you post on this.

    Is you theme easy to set up? Wonder if it would work for The Highway Like the clean look and has feature i have been looking for

    Suzie Cheel’s last blog post..All In Order

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  10. Stephan Miller said

    April 20 2008 @ 4:26 pm

    It’s pretty easy. You have to set some color codes. As long as you know those, you should be alright. The font choice is a drop-down box. The other features are a little more complex but you can disable them until you learn how to use them.

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  11. freesurveyblog said

    June 25 2008 @ 11:48 pm

    good information
    Thanks for share ^^

    freesurveyblog’s last blog post..Surveypanelgroup.com

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