So you've created a related content widget (using this helpful post as a guide), so now let's work on refining it.
How does NewsGator find related content?
For the page that the widget is residing on we look in our database for that very same post URL. How would it be in our database? Well, it should be no surprise that NewsGator syndicates SO MUCH CONTENT that yes! your blog is probably in there too. This post gets sent over to our friends at mSpoke, who analyze the content to define what topics the post is related to. We then hit up your whitelist to find other posts that match those topics.
Where should I put my related content widget?
The best place for related content widgets is on unique pages within your blog/website. The main page of a blog (for instance, http://blogs.newsgator.com/newsgator_technical_blog) usually isn't an actual article post, and so there aren't any topics that could define it (I'll show you how to get around that via a query string parameter on the script block).
How can I ensure that I get the best related content?
- Select a large number of feeds for your whitelist that are rich in the content you would like to show. The more articles that can be found in your whitelist, the less the widget will resort to the secondary search terms. Also, feeds that contain full text are best: the way to test this is if you view the feed in a reader, you see several paragraphs of content and not just the headline.
- Use secondary search terms just in case we can't find anything for the article the widget is residing on. While these searches may not be as closely related to the article, they are still based on our capable content searching techniques to find articles within your whitelist.
- If you have control over it, make sure the posts in your personal feed (the articles that we send over to mSpoke) have full text descriptions! This is how mSpoke figures out the topic of the post.
Why aren't any topics being found?
As I mentioned before, the main page of your site isn't really a topics-related post. But you can tell the widget to associate the content with a particular topic in the script block:
<script src="http://nmp.newsgator.com/ngbuzz/buzz.ashx?buzzId=1234 &apiToken=abcd&topic=widgets"></script>This is a great way to show topics-oriented posts on your main page, or if your content isn't syndicated (won't be found in our database) you can select a topic for a particular page.
Another thing that could happen is we're not finding the exact post URL for where the widget is. If this is the case, you can override the URL in the script block:
<script src="http://nmp.newsgator.com/ngbuzz/buzz.ashx?buzzId=1234 &apiToken=abcd&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fsomepage.html"></script>
What if my blog feed isn't in your system?
Add it to your whitelist!
What topics did you find for this post?
This code in the widget will show you:
{for topic in Topics}
${topic}
{forelse}
No topics found
{/for}
I need more information! MOAR!!
http://developer.newsgator.com/wiki/index.php?title=Related_Content_Widgets
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