Related post widget for blogger with thumbnails

Note: The same widget also works for platforms such as Wordpress and Typepad amongst others.

Blogger is one of the most used blogging platform but lacks the related post widget which according to me is important to decrease my blogs bounce rate. And the same feeling is shared by many other blogger. However, some people at Google don’t feel the same. I remember to have read a response by one Google employee on a question by one blogger user to incorporate the related post feature in blogger. To this, the Google employee responded (this is based on recollection, which i read some weeks back and might not be the same as i remember it to be. If you find the post, please send the link in the comments section) that the label feature can take care of it. But clicking on a label is the last thing i do on other blogs, i myself read. So how can i expect someone else to do so on my blog and feel more engaged with my blog.

Related post widget as it appears on my blog

 

Things which a related post widget should have

I searched a lot (improve your searching capabilities with a Google a day) to find a good related post widget for my blog which would satisfy the following aspects:

• Looks clean and not filled by ads
• Is not complicated to implement on my blog
• Has a good loading speed

Though there area a lot of options available, which succeed on either of the parameters, nothing based on my search was as good and easy to implement as LinkWithin. LinkWithin is the best related post widget which i have seen in a long time. Its beautiful and takes less than 2 minutes to implement on the blog.

How to implement the related post widget

Visit LinkWithin, fill a extremely simple form (see image below). Once you click the Get Widget icon, follow the four steps provided on LinkWithin site and voila you are done. Refresh your blog and you should be able to see the related posts.

To get a further understanding of LinkWithin, check out their FAQ page. This page provides details such as:

• How does the widget decide what stories to show?
• how to customize the text which appears above the widget?
• how to customize the placement of the widget on the blog?
• how they plan to make money with this?

How to change / customize favicon in Blogger

Adding a favicon to one’s site is perhaps one of the finer things to do in personalizing a blog to one’s liking. Though there have been many sites showing how to add a favicon to a blogger blog, majority of them involved fiddling with the code of the blog. Realizing that i am not much of a software guy, i just skipped all these options.

Custom favicons are now official on Blogger in draft. Blogger in draft users now have an option to change the blogger default favicon to ones own personalized favicon.

Things to do before changing / Customizing the favicon in Blogger

• Blogger accepts favicons only in .ico format as of now. You can use any service to convert the image to an .ico format. I used icoconverter for converting the image to .ico format. (Note: Blogger accepts only 10kb sized favicon images only.)

Changing / Customizing favicon in Blogger

1. Open Designs | Page Elements (Layout tab for new interface users)
2. You will see the Blogger favicon. Click the Edit button
3. Upload your personal favicon
4. Save. You should now see the blogger favicon replaced by your own favicon.
5. Save the changes made to the template and your personalized favicon should appear in the browser window or tab.

Step 1

Don’t see the favicon in your dashboard as given in step 1, join Blogger in draft and the option will become available.

Step 2

Step 3 

Step 4

Update: BTW the update of the favicon to my blog was not instant. It took less than a day for my personalized favicon to appear on my blog.