In a way, we’re all related
I have a huge list of things I’d like to have on my personal site but can rarely find the time or energy to implement many of them. Recently though I was able to scrape together enough of both to add two very subtle things that I’ve wanted to see on the site for a very long time.
The first is “related posts”. There are countless related posts plugins out there and all of them work fairly well but since I already use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for my tagging efforts, and it has a function for related posts, I’m using a slightly tweaked version of that. When WordPress 2.3 is released, and tags are included by default along with a way to import all of my UTW tags, I may need to adjust the way I handle related posts. Until then, these seem to work well enough.
The second was I’ve always wanted to utilized my Ma.gnolia bookmarks better. Bookmarks seem to come and go and rarely are they ever used as a really valueable resource. I think the way I am using them now will add a lot of value to bookmarks that I’ve stored on Ma.gnolia, even if I had saved them there a very long time ago*. What’s more is that I’m adding value to my posts too!
The way I am using my bookmarks is through “related links” which can be found just to the right of the related posts on the bottom of every post on my site. I’m using Ma.gnolia’s API to search my Ma.gnolia account for bookmarks tagged with the same tags as the current post and constructing a list of the latest five of those. I’ll be working on extending this somehow to show every applicable bookmark but I’ve found that five should provide enough of a resource in most cases.
So come to the site, take a look, and let me know what you think. I’ll be releasing this new “Ma.gnolia Related” plugin after I’ve let it run on my site for a little while and I’m able to clean up the code a little. Oh, and it uses an as yet unreleased method argument of Ma.gnolia’s API - so I may need to wait until the next version of their API is officially released. (And to those that will probably wonder, yes I’m caching requests. Expertly, I may add. 
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July 27th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
nice job, colin. great idea to pull in ma.gnolia bookmarks. i have a feeling it will also remind *you* of things you’ve forgotten that you bookmarked! waiting for the release…
July 27th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Freaking sweet.
July 27th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
cool, wouldn’t it be better to link to the sites directly instead of the magnolia bookmark pages?
July 27th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Hillary: You’re probably right! Look for the release in the coming weeks.
Chris: Yes, yes it is.
Josue: In some cases yes. But more often than not I jot down some thoughts within Ma.gnolia that may, or may not, add some context.
July 27th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
Include it as an option when you release the plugin if you can
Oh and “you need a gravatar”!
July 27th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
Colin-
This sounds really stinkin’ cool. What are the possibilities of bringing in from groups and contacts? Those are my favorite feeds to watch.
Thanks, C
July 27th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Chris Pallé: I have it, at this point, so that it can work with all public bookmarks, personal bookmarks, and group bookmarks. I have not yet tried it with “my contact’s bookmarks” but I could certainly build that in, or perhaps you could tweak it once I release it.
July 28th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Sweet Colin! I can’t wait to see what you’ve built. The Ma.gnolia plugin for WordPress that I maintain is showing its age as more and more people encounter issues with their host locking down fopen(), so it would be great if your work could provide a better way for folks to display their links.
If you need anyone to help test, please let me know!
Alex
July 28th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Alex: Obviously during my research for what was already out there I came across your plugin, which is great and works well, but I didn’t want to use RSS for the obvious reason that each post may contain more than one tag - which means that I could be able to use your plugin for this specific use case.
Using the API just seemed like a better approach.
I’m hoping that the Ma.gnolia team has the time within the next week or so to publicly release and documenting some of the method arguments I’m using for this to work - so that I can have others try this plugin and get feedback prior to opening its source to the world. You’ll be on my list!