If you are a professional blogger, you should be eager for increasing your traffic and keeping your readers engaged with your blog. Integrating with stories that are relevant and interesting to readers of a particular post is a excellent way which definitely worth a try. Fortunately our Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke have implemented this request and converted it as one awesome built-in feature. The related posts is automatically retrieved from all posts with the following process:

  1. Split the current post title with space and build the main keywords
  2. Try to find out the title of other posts matched those keywords
  3. Try to find out the description of other posts  matched those keywords
  4. Try to find out the content of other posts matched those keywords
  5. List the top [x] posts from those matched posts

You can specify [x] posts from settings panel, even you can uncheck the option [Show related posts which may talk about similar topics] in Reading Setting Panel to turn the "related posts" feature off.

But today I would like to show you a alternative way to feature related posts on your dnn blog. That is a external plugin [LinkWithin]. You should know most blogging platforms now feature a number of third-party plugins that can display a list of related stories on your blog, or even on other blogs on the Internet. Typically, these plugins will look at how a story was tagged and then display a short list of similar stories that use the same keywords. LinkWithin is the newest contender in this market. The plugin looks at tags, but it also analyzes other factors like relevancy, popularity, and recency. Unlike similar plugins, however, LinkWithin doesn't just display a list of headlines underneath each post, but also a thumbnail with a picture from each post, which makes it far more attractive than most of its competitors and is why I recommend it for you here.

The plugin is available with providing you with a code snippet that you can use on most blogging platform including SunBlogNuke. We assume that LinkWithin does some semantic analysis in the background in order to arrive at its list of related stories, though we weren't able to track down any details. Please take a look at how it action in the end of this post or the screenshot below:

Related Posts in dnn blog module

Okey, now let me cover you how to make it work well in your dnn blog – SunBlogNuke. Actually it is so easy that there are some simple steps as follows:

1) Link to http://www.linkwithin.com/learn and fill in the form like the screenshot below:

LinkWithin form

2) Click "Get Widget" to get your code snippet for your blog.

3) Login your dnn website with blogger account and enter your template manage panel.

4) Switch the template type as "Footer in the Post Detail" and paste the code snippet into text area.

code-snippet-for-related-posts

5) Click "Update", visit any post of your blog and you should see it works like a charm.

Note that the 4) and 5) are optional, you also insert the code snippet into your theme template (Themes/YourCustomizedTheme/DetailView.ascx) as follows:

code-snippet-in-theme

Please get the more details from FAQs link about how to customize LinkWithin Widget and from the tutorial about Developing Your Customized Theme for DNN Blog Module.

That is all. Enjoy blogging via Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke :)