related reading

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Related Reading or related posts or related content is a discovery feature of some blogging silos (like Medium, Wordpress.com) where at the end of a blog post, the system suggests another deemed-likely-interesting-to-you given your assumed interest in the topic that you just read about.

Depending on the site there are one or more user interfaces for implementing this sort of functionality:

  • Continuous scrolling functionality where additional articles simply appear and the URL of the site changes automatically as one scrolls down the page
  • Related Posts block which can typically have one to three links to related posts and may also included titles, synopses, and even featured photos. This method is often used on websites by leveraging algorithms and meta data (post titles, content, tags, categories, custom taxonomies, etc.) to typically present one to three posts that are related to the current post. These blocks are sometimes done as an SEO method which also creates additional internal links to one's site.


Why

Smoother cross-article reading experience

Related reading provides a smoother experience for people reading content across sites. It allows readers to go seamlessly from one post to the next, even from a different author, without having to deal with a new site, adapting to a new layout & navigation, etc.

Enables just keep scrolling

In Wordpress.com and Medium, they go as far as to pick the next most-likely-interesting post and simply append it to the one you're reading -- meaning that the reader just keeps scrolling, reading as many articles as s/he wants without even needing to click on a link. This stream-style interface seems to be a very effective UX for keeping readers' attention.

It's a different UI on links, one that has no "UI" beyond scrolling.

Reach a broader audience

You should enable your posts to show up in other sites's related reading sections if you care about the ideas inside the post reaching a broader audience.

Silo UX parity

By providing a Related Reading feature that shows other indieweb articles, you can provide the benefit of a smoother cross-site experience without your readers having to use a silo.

By enabling your posts to be syndicated into others indieweb sites's Related Reading feature, you enable those sites to similarly provide as smooth as (or better) an experience than silos.

Increased engagement

These features often help to direct people (especially those arriving via search) to potentially useful and related content on your site.


How to

How to implement a cross-indieweb-site Related Reading feature.

IndieWeb Examples

Kartik Prabhu

Ryan Barrett

gRegor

Jamie Tanna

Murray (theAdhocracy)

  • Murray uses same-domain webmentions to generate related content sections at build time, for example: https://theadhocracy.co.uk/note/what-we-talk-about-when-we-say-webmentions
    • The incoming webmention feed (which uses webmention.io) is parsed and same-domain mentions are split into a separate list so that they don't appear as likes/comments etc.
    • Mainly done to build a content/knowledge web, rather than explicitly for discovery.
    • Currently same-domain webmentions are sent manually but will hopefully be automated in the future

capjamesg

  • capjamesg hosts a content recommendation engine called Novacast that he uses to show related content on his blog posts. Novacast is powered by text embeddings. The top five most related articles according to their embeddings are displayed in a "Read more content like this" section.

Here is how the section shows up:

Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

Silo Examples

Related examples in the wild

Brainstorming

  • how to publish an article that can be included in others's Related Reading features:
    • use h-entry. basically anything you would do to make your posts readable in an indieweb reader should make them readable in Related Reading sections too!
  • how to provide a Related Reading feature with articles from other indieweb sites
    • how do you pick which sites get articles from? whitelist? manual curation
    • how do you figure out what articles from another site are related to yours, or similarly interesting? would a recommendation engine help?
    • consider providing a JS-required related reading feature so that others's content that you display DOES NOT get indexed by search engines as being on your site.
  • Ideas from https://chat.indieweb.org/2019-02-19#t1550611145929000
    • update the webmention processing to have your own articles show up as "related posts" instead of mentions
    • using self-detection of webmentions to group is as related posts
    • you could also use tags/categories
    • how you display webmentions is totally up to you so that is within the rules ;)
    • I might do something with tags bc I would like a bit of granular control over it. Maybe `u-category h-entry` similar to person tag
  • Marking up related article/post links, some thoughts / possibilities:
    • maybe u-related-entry on links inside an h-entry ?
    • in Atom, maybe <link rel="related" href="article.html" /> inside an Atom <entry> ?
      • Any prior art or practices here?

Services / Plugins

Articles

Previous Technologies

  • Webrings

Criticism

  • Depending on the implementation, self-hosting algorithmic search to generate related posts may create an undue load on one's server which could cause issues with your hosting.
  • May increase page load time
  • Some services do a poor job of intuiting relevant related posts
  • It may be better/easier to link directly to your related content in a meaningful context, than to use a generic related posts box somewhere else on your page.


See Also

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