Spotlight: nRelate

A feature where I shine a figurative Spotlight on anything I can possibly talk about. Books, authors, shows, movies, you name it and I will offer my opinion on it.

Since my first major blog change back in the new year, improving my blog has become sort of an obsession for me. It started off with just trying to make my blog distinguishable and now, it has snowballed into frenetically searching for how-to posts on the web to constantly furnish my blog. 

The other week, I was messing around on the Internet searching for something I could do when I stumbled across this article, Why I Stopped Using LinkWithin (And Switched to nRelate). As far as I knew then, LinkWithin was the only internal linking site available (might I add free?) and being introduced to an alternative meant an upgrade. So after skimming the article and finding out all the many customizations available with nRelate (and why LinkWithin isn't recommended), I promptly made the switch to nRelate.

Can I say that I am super happy? I'm loving everything I'm getting with nRelate which includes:

- being able to change the size of the thumbnails

- being able to pick a default image

- being able to change the title for the related content box

- being able to choose the level of relevancy I want the results to be

and MUCH more.

The thing I love the most about nRelate is the results it brings back. Even with my low relevancy setting, I find the links it finds are much more accurate than LinkWithin's.

It's also super easy to install! All you need to do is sign up for an account and follow the super simple instructions nRelate gives you (which isn't much different from LinkWithin's) and presto, you will have a brand new internal linking system down (after two hours but what's that in the grand scheme of things?).

There are some things I'm still confused about and trying to find an answer for though:

1. Why nRelate does not always appear on my blog. Is it indexing my new posts? Is that why it is absent?

2. Why some of the pictures for my posts do not show up as thumbnails. Weird.

But despite these setbacks, my excitement has not waned. I love that I have so much room to personalize something that seems so small when you consider all the other things that go into a blog. And I think that's what really sets nRelate apart from LinkWithin. (Well, that and also the fact that it is not a 'parasitic widget'.)