Once you get a few years worth of content (posts and comments) in your blog, you’ve likely got some pretty good and interesting content in there. Over the last 2 years, I’ve been working on creating new ways to leverage my content.
While the standard blog themes for WordPress, Moveable Type and others do a good job of creating readable and browse-able interfaces for your content. What they don’t do is highlight the most interesting content from your blog.
While plugins like Share This can help push your content out to other social sites, what about showing the best content from your own site?
I created my Popularity Contest plugin as an attempt to solve this from one direction - visitor interaction. It does a good job, highlighting the most popular content on my site and showing contextual popularity lists in categories and month archives.
What Popularity Contest doesn’t do is allow me to highlight posts that I think are important and interesting. In a way, Popularity Contest shows you what is which of your posts have gotten indexed highest for common searches in search engines. There are times when people may show up at a post (or a joke that I re-blogged from an e-mail, my Women’s Asses post comes to mind here) on a completely unrelated search.
Anyway, it’s my site and I’m going to highlight some content that I feel is important. Enter my Articles page. This is a rather simple implementation, I just add a custom field to a post in WordPress and it shows up on the Articles page, under topic headings1. I can make this available as a plugin if there is demand.
So now I feel like I’ve got the content pretty well covered. Popularity Contest picks up the stuff you guys find most interesting, and I can push things I think are important up to the top on the Articles page. But that isn’t everything you can do with your content.
The content itself has some interesting information in it - for example, you’ve probably got a fair number of outbound links in there. We can certainly do something interesting with that content as well.
My old site had a links page, and when I went to look at it to migrate it over I saw that is was embarrassingly out of date. Why maintain that list manually when I’ve got lots of links in my site content I can use to keep that list automatically updated. That’s what I’ve done on my new Links page.
Look for this to be released as a plugin in the near future - I’m currently testing some changes I made to work around a few issues. More on that in a follow-up post.
- Sometimes more than once due to being in multiple topics - I don’t feel this is necessarily a problem. [back]
Popularity: 6% [?]
Mike adds this Comment:
Alex,
I really like your articles page. I have been thinking of creating a similar page to capture my personal favorite posts. I think this would make a good plugin.
Mike
November 30th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
Charlie adds this Comment:
I think what you’ve done for the Articles page as a plugin would be very nice. It would definitely be useful in highlighting some of the better posts that have dropped off the radar due to their age. I’m assuming ‘Link Harvest’ is the name of the as-yet unreleased plugin used for your Links page?
November 30th, 2006 at 8:03 pm
Gregory Pittman adds this Comment:
Agreed. The possibility of a plugin to manage important articles is great. And I look forward to using the outbound links plugin as soon as it’s available.
November 30th, 2006 at 9:41 pm
Montoya adds this Comment:
I currently do my own “articles” page by hand which I call “featured posts.” Your way of doing it is really cool though, and definitely less time consuming
November 30th, 2006 at 9:46 pm
Richard Brown adds this Comment:
Yes I to feel the articles page would be excellent. Will you make it a plugin please?
Many thanks.
December 1st, 2006 at 12:16 am
stephen o'grady adds this Comment:
“I can make this available as a plugin if there is demand.”
there’s demand. big time demand
December 1st, 2006 at 2:49 am
Phil adds this Comment:
That is an excellent way of producing articles! I really like that and second all the above calls for you to definitely make it into a plugin.
So many times I have come across different people’s ways of bringing old but good content to light again so that it doesn’t get ignored, but this is the best. Nice one!
December 1st, 2006 at 9:50 am
Dave adds this Comment:
A topically organized Articles page plugin is something I’d use, too. Currently I have “Best of” pages for each year, but the arrangement within each page is merely chronological, and the titles often give little clue about the content.
December 1st, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Brett adds this Comment:
Indeed an “articles” section, or a way to group important posts is an excellent idea. I was surprised to see that this wasn’t something already available in Wordpress initially. Alex, hopefully your contributions can make it into CVS, or whatever it’s called now. =) Keep up the excellent work, and consider that some may even like it to be a block within the navigation, not just it’s own page…
December 1st, 2006 at 4:46 pm
Philip adds this Comment:
I would definitely be interested in an articles page plugin, and like the previous commenter I might like the option to have it as part of the site’s navigation.
December 2nd, 2006 at 9:15 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
I don’t currently plan to make it sidebar-able - not sure how that would work (seems like it would be unweildy). But I do take bribes, if you’d like to pitch an idea and fund it.
December 2nd, 2006 at 11:37 pm
David Bradley adds this Comment:
Yes please. Do make this available, I’ve just installed you’re Popularity Contest plugin, but this one sounds great for an egocentric blogger
December 3rd, 2006 at 11:47 am
Vince Kimball adds this Comment:
I’d like to see an Articles page plugin too.
Thanks!
December 3rd, 2006 at 2:44 pm
Rirath adds this Comment:
Yes, please do release the Articles plugin, it sounds very interesting.
December 4th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
Jimmy adds this Comment:
+1 for Article Page Plugin!
December 5th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
ianmack adds this Comment:
Agreed, this article plugin would be very very useful. I can send over a batch of chocolate chip cookies if that speeds up your motivation….
December 5th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
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April 18th, 2007 at 11:19 am