Related posts widget got better. Now you can link to external pages with one click right on recommendations tab in administrator interface. Screenshot:
How it works:
In "switch to" field (1) you enter URL of a page from site you want to link to (that site should have ratings widget installed and a key should be generated). Press Enter and wait until it's loaded.
Chose a parent page on the left panel. Click link (2) to connect recommended page.
If you setup widget to display thumbnails, for external pages they should be specified manually. For Blogspot users it's easy, just click on (3).
Don't forget to save changes. Every time you switch to a new site it's address will be displayed below as a link for quick switching. To switch to pages of the site that you're currently managing click on "Self" link. Links display up to 3 recently used sites.
Important: to be able to switch to site this site's "Allow other users to see my ratings" option should be turned on.
Reminding what is what on recommendations page. On the left panel there're the parent pages that you're creating recommendations for. Parent page you're working on right now is expanded and marked green. On the right panel there're the pages of your site. To create new parent page click on "←"; to connect page with parent click on "✓". Lightgray boxes mark pages already connected to selected parent, lightgreen boxes mark pages picked automatically based on labels (but not yet connected).
Coming soon: automatic feed detection (to avoid manual thumbnails setup) and automatic detection of similar pages from external sites.
If you haven't got access to the management panel yet, do now. Recommendations tab now has settings:
You can:
specify what widget should do in case no related posts were set for a page:
pick automatically (based on labels);
show nothing;
show static HTML. Nothing stops you from adding javascript though;
show thumbnails (you should set feed URL);
set number of links to be displayed. If number of related (or automatically found) pages exceeds that number, then specified number of randomly picked links will be shown;
set max length of displayed titles (or links if it's set to not show the titles);
change widget layout;
Manual related posts creation interface has also changed and became more efficient:
← link still creates recommendation containers and ✓ still creates relations, but now when you select a container on the right panel links get highlighted:
darkgray — main page (container URL);
lightgray — related posts (recommendations);
lightgreen — automatically found related pages that you might want to use;
Widget code (for Blogger) you need to take from the same page , see above the recommendations list. Possible issues
Not all the pages present on the right panel. That could happen if users from different countries read your blog, in this case pages can be saved into the database with their local domains: your-blog.blogspot.com.nl or your-blog.blogspot.co.uk. To resolve this issue you need to send domain parameter in the widget code. For example (for Blogger):
Today's topics: what are and how to setup and display the recommendations (related posts) and tops widgets.
In order to be able to use widgets described below you need to get access to the account management panel. Open the link, click on "Generate secret key" and follow the instruction. After you login to the management panel you'll see 3 tabs: Settings, Recommendations and Tops.
Settings
Let's leave this page for now, it is created for the future purposes. All what you can do there now is change the secret key and allow/forbid token generation. If generation is forbidden you couldn't reset the secret key with a token. You might need to reset secret key if you lost it; restoration of a secret key via email isn't yet implemented.
Recommendations
Please check out the possible issues below before reporting any problems with this page. Here you can create the lists of related (recommended) materials for each page on your website where you have rating widget installed. At the left hand side of the page you'll find the relations you've already created; at the right hand side - pages you can create relations for. For example, if you want to create relations for the page with URL http://fruitfulbookmarks-en.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-to-duplicate-rating-information.html, you need to click "←" link near that URL; that creates a container. Then by pressing "✓" you could add the related URLs into the container. Click on the image above to see a bigger image, that will help to understand the process better. When you add the links their titles will be loaded automatically. You can change them though. You can change the links as well, but you'll have to set the titles manually in this case. Save the recommendations. There are 2 ways to display the widget:
copy the code (for now there's only code for Blogger) and paste it into the desired place of your blog's template. In this case for all the pages of your blog the related posts will be displaying automatically (of course if you created them first).
if you wish to display a particular list of recommended materials then click the "Preview" link and copy the given code into the desired place of your page (or post). In this case (if you haven't forgotten include styles http://graddit.com/css/graddit.css) when viewing the page you'll see something like this: With some code added: <div id='graddit_recommendation' style='display: inline; visibility: hidden;'><div style='background-image: url(http://img.graddit.com/favicon.ico); display: inline-block; width: 16px; height: 16px;'></div> You can change this title</div><script src='http://graddit.com/rec/eng/6527129645013929210?id=graddit_recommendation'></script> you can get something like this (with changed title):
You can change this title
Possible issues.
Resolved; update widget code. At the right hand side you can't see the pages' URLs, mostly the URLs of the main page. That can happen if you have rating widget shown at the main page (not under cut only), in this case when people vote ratings get assigned with the main page URL. This will be fixed soon. Nevertheless, if you could figure out real addresses of the displayed ratings, the related posts will be shown at the proper pages. If you don't want to get too deep into the mechanism of the ratings just wait for the fix.
For now you can't create recommendations not related to a page with the rating widget installed. This will be fixed soon.
Manually create recommendations is too hard and boring. Is there a way to make it in automatic mode? Yep, it's boring, but it gives you much more control over the process and you can add materials more relevant to the shown pages. I'm planning to implement some automation though. You will be able to display related URLs for the pages without manually created recommendations; the options will be: show random links for the given set, display another widget using callback function, automatic links based on labels (tags).
Update. Related posts widget has become better; read more.
Tops
Tops are a bit easier to control. Top is a lists of pages that got more votes, rating or views:
You can set:
number of displayed links;
maximum top refresh time (in minutes, not less than 60 and not more than 1440 - these limits will be changed after I'll get some stats data);
sort criteria (number of votes/number of views/average rating);
options:
only for the last preiod - if ticked, top will be formed based on short period of time information; if not ticked, the current values of views/votes/rating will be taken as a base;
less rated records first - sort order;
exclude main page - links to the main page will not be displayed in the top widget;
load titles - load pages titles when displayed in tops. Loading will not happen every time top is displayed; data will be cached for the period of 12 hours (maximum);
drop URL parameters - recommended to be set; this will help you to get rid of the links to the same pages having different parameters in the URLs (for example, ?showComment=...). Of course if these parameters are not important for your site;
show ratings near to links - show sort criteria values. I recommend to have it turned on before you actually expose top to the users and turn it off then; users don't need to see this and might get confused;
inline styles - try various parameters to change the layout of your top widget;
"cut text after" - maximum number of characters in the displayed URL (or titles); 0 - do not cut.
Playing with online styles can help you get something like this:
Top Posts
That's all folks. Ask questions, criticize, tell me how would like to change these widgets. Found a mistake? Use the misspellings tracking widget at the top right corner of the page. Stay tuned.
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