Widget Workshop: Let's create a Related Content widget, shall we?

What is it?
We've released quite a bit of press about this exciting new feature over the past week, you can read about it in more detail on the NewsGator Widgets Blog and in the NewsGator Daily press release.

Basically, you provide content sources for a widget (using a whitelist), and we perform a search for relevant content pertaining to the very page that the widget resides on. If I have a blog post about robots, my widget will show content about robots. When that same widget shows up on a blog post about laser beams, it will show posts pertaining to laser beams (and hopefully sharks with laser beams on their heads). All the posts are coming from a list of feeds that I've specified as having great content about these topics.

Note: Since related content is such an awesome feature that involves a lot of extensive searching and sleuthing, you'll have to enable it through sales via Craig Lachman. Shoot him an email and he'll get you squared away.

How to do it? Let's walk through the creation of our very own Related Content widget that can be found on the widgets blog.

Here's what you need before you create the widget:

• Make sure you've signed up for related content (see the note above).
• Create a whitelist of feeds you'd like the related content widget to pull posts from (whitelist creation is done through the Utilities tab in Editor's Desk. More information can be found in our Editor's Desk User's Guide-pdf).

Let's make that widget!!

1. Create a new widget, and style it up as you'd like.
2. Navigate to Content for your widget, and select the Search for Content tab.
   
3. For Search by, select Related Content. While you're here, a link is provided to the Wiki article that talks more in depth about the feature.
4. In the dropdown provided, select the whitelist you've created.
5. If you'd like, you can provide secondary search terms that the related content widget will search for. For example, if your widget is showing 10 posts and we are only able to find 6 that are in your whitelist, the rest will be filled in via those keywords.
6. The next step is to test your widget. To get an idea of what would show up in the widget when it is on a particular page, you can test the URL here.

Those are the basics. For the true nitty-gritty of Related Content widgets please see our Wiki article. There are a number of ways to refine your search and ensure the best quality content, but this article is simply a means of getting you started.

One more note: When this feature was first deployed a couple weeks ago, it was referred to in Editor's Desk as "Topic" search. After the load today, this will change to "Related Content" search.