Draw people into your blog by showing them other posts in the same category.
People browse blogs all kinds of ways. One way is to come in at the Home page and browse what’s there, then click a category link in your navigation bar to go deeper into the site. Clicking a category link identifies a topic that interests them. But how can you get them to keep browsing what’s there when all they’ll see is the few most recent posts displayed there?
One way is to display a random list of category posts in the sidebar (see screenshot right or visit this page for an example). There are a number of ways to do this, but the quickest and easiest (which is usually my preferred method) is to use the Customizable Post Listings plugin by Scott Reilly with a few simple lines of code inserted in your sidebar.
Customizable Post Listings isn’t new. Its latest version (1.1) was released back in 2004. But it still works like a charm — at least in WordPress 2.0.4 on my server. From the description:
Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts, and other post listings using the post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner. You can narrow post searches by specifying categories and/or authors, among other things.
I already use it on aneclecticmind.com to display recent posts and recently commented posts, so adding another feature that takes advantage of this plugin wasn’t a big deal. In fact, it made sense.
I won’t go into details about how to download and install the plugin. You can figure that out for yourself. If you’re new to WordPress and plugins and need help, I will plug the book I co-authored with Miraz Jordan here: WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide. It has a whole chapter dedicated to plugins. Enough said.
Once the plugin has been installed and activated, open your sidebar.php file (or the file in which you want to include the random post code). Then enter the following code where you want the list of random posts to appear:
<?php if (is_category()) { ?>
<h2><?php single_cat_title('Random Articles in '); ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php c2c_get_random_posts(16,"<li>%post_URL%</li>", $wp_query->query_vars['cat']); ?>
</ul>
<?php } ?>Keep in mind that this code uses the tags I use in my sidebar for formatting: h2 for sidebar headings and ul for an unordered list. Your HTML formatting may differ, so you might have to adjust this a bit for your site.
The first and last lines of this code provide conditional instructions. They basically say that if the page being displayed is a category page, show the random posts listing. So if the Home page or a single post page is displayed, the random category list does not appear.
The single_cat_title tag is a neat way to customize the heading so it displays the name of the category.
You might also want to change the value in the c2c_get_random_posts tag. I have it set to show 16 posts; you can show more or fewer. If you put a value in there that’s higher than the number of posts in the category, all of the posts will be displayed in random order. But if you want to display all of the posts, why not do it in reverse chronological order? Just replace
<?php c2c_get_random_posts(16,"<li>%post_URL%</li>", $wp_query->query_vars['cat']); ?>
with
<?php c2c_get_recent_posts(150,"<li>%post_URL%</li>", $wp_query->query_vars['cat']); ?>
Remember to make the value big enough to cover all the posts in each category. I don’t know if there’s a limit to the value, but I probably wouldn’t use this if I had more than a hundred or so posts in a category anyway. It would make the sidebar too long. (My opinion.)
Of course, you might want to change the heading, too — something like
<h2><?php single_cat_title('All Articles in '); ?></h2>
would be more appropriate when showing all the posts.
As you can imagine, there are lots of ways you can play with this to list post titles in the sidebar. And if your post titles are intriguing enough, these few lines of code might keep visitors on your site a bit longer.
The revision to my Excel 2007 Visual QuickStart Guide was shipped to the printer this week. My editor expects the book to be in stores by year-end.
I installed SpamSieve on my PowerBook yesterday and it immediately began working — even before I had a chance to start training it! Installation isn’t difficult, but you’ll need to follow the instructions in the PDF manual that comes with SpamSieve to get it right. If everything is set up properly, SpamSieve training commands will appear in your application’s menus, as shown here. Then, every time you launch your e-mail client, SpamSieve also opens. It works in the background, moving messages identified as spam to a special Spam mailbox or folder, allowing you to train it to recognize spam or tell it that a message it thinks is spam really isn’t. When you’re finished working with e-mail and Quit, SpamSieve automatically quits, too.
Interested in seeing how SpamSieve is doing? You can check out its statistics. Here’s what it looks like on my PowerBook; keep in mind that I check a limited number of e-mail accounts from this computer so it hasn’t had much to work with. The percent accuracy should get higher as I continue training SpamSieve; the manual recommends that you train until it has processed 1,000 messages for the best results.
This resulted in a problem: My PC could no longer access folders on my Mac. I simply could not log in. (For some reason, my computer insisted on inserting its name in the User Name field in the Connect dialog; see screenshot.) And, on the Mac side, I could no longer mount a predetermined folder from my PC on my Mac.
That said, Vista, unlike XP, does not appear to support the “network places” feature. Instead,there’s a Network and Sharing Center where you can set up Sharing and Discovery options. I found that if I followed the following steps, I could create a Public folder that was accessible by my Mac:
Choose Public from the pop-up menu.