Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Website Wednesday: Exploring the Archives


On Wednesdays I write about websites that I visit often.

Some of you may have noticed a new feature here on the ol' blog. At the bottom of every post are three links to Our Odyssey's archives under the phrase, "You may also like these stories."

The links are automatically generated by LinkWithin, a widget that searches through the site for related content. If you are reading a post about Hawaii, for instance, LinkWithin looks for past articles with the word "Hawaii" in them. How it decides which words to match seems to be a bit of a mystery, but hey, the widget is free, so I'm not complaining. It even pulls out old photos to spice up the link a little bit.

More importantly, it is automatic. We've been writing this blog for over four years and have 1,200 posts. I think there's some good stuff buried in our bloggy past, and I'd been wanting to bring some of back it into the limelight to share with you. New readers, especially, might discover some helpful tidbits. But I'm really lazy organized and searching and re-posting the archives by hand seemed an awful lot like work inefficient.

Then I read this on New Ideas Welcome, and immediately knew my archiving dream had been realized. LinkWithin is free, simple to install, and works quietly in the background. Works for me!

I hope that those of you clicking on those past blog posts are enjoying them. I know that having the widget in place makes the webpages load a little slower. If you find that annoying, please let me know in the comments. If you've figured out how LinkWithin decides something is relevant, let me know that, too. As always, thanks for sharing our journey.

7 comments:

  1. It's the first time I'd seen it and I find it really interesting and useful.

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  2. Thanks for the link to my blog! Love the new widget - isn't it fantastic?

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  3. I just went over to my blog and installed this...looks like it's going to be fun. Thanks!

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  4. I've never heard of it. I'll have to go look into it. Thanks for the tip.

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  5. PS - Thanks for sending so much traffic to my blog - holy cow!

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  6. What a neat little widget, I'm certainly going to have to look into it!

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  7. Wow, what a great blog.

    We also travel full time, but in a 30 foot Lazy Daze. Like you, we love the life. I've bookmarked your blog and hopefully one of these days, we'll meet up on the road.

    Also, Thanks for the tip on the widgit, I've just installed it on my blog as well. I'll link to your blog so everyone will know where I got the great idea!

    Love the Bus!

    Kate
    cholulared.blogspot.com

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