Automatic Related Posts Engine In Article Footer [Development Concept][Devs Wanted]
Defining The Problem
You read a post, maybe read the comments, maybe even add a comment yourself; but when you have finished interacting with that particular post, where do you go?
Well, I might look at that author's other articles, or I might go back to the tag-stream I was browsing, or possibly back to my own feed. Thing is, there is no obvious one-click way to go to similar content on Steemit or chainBB. It is also very difficult to find relevant posts that are already 2 or 3 days old. The chainBB forum is great if an article has plenty of comments as the forum structure promotes discussions. But the vast majority of members use the Steemit platform and the choices tend to be either brand new posts that are a few minutes old or trending posts that have envious earnings.
What about all the interesting stuff buried in the middle of the Steemit stream?
The Related Posts Widget
Wouldn't it be good to automatically generate links to content that is related to the article being read?
Wouldn't it be good to have your articles promoted at the end of other articles on the same subject?
Wouldn't it be good that your article can be seen and read for the whole of the 7 day earning period?
I call it a "widget" merely because that is the term used for apps added to blogging platforms. Essentially it is a small code snippet added to the end of your post that automatically generates Related Posts similar to yours. At the same time, other authors will also be promoting your article at the foot of their post.
This will keep readers engaged and "on topic", discovering both new and established authors and keeping up to date with a range of recent opinions on their favourite subject.
Phase One: The Personal "Read my other posts"
To get people accustomed to inserting code snippets at the end of their articles, this personal app would search your recent active posts, check the tags, and post the four most relevant other articles that you have written.
This saves readers having to look at your profile and browse the other articles in your blog. This is a handy one-click solution to keeping readers engaged with your content.
Phase Two: The Curated Posts Network
There are now so many curation initiatives that it is sometimes hard to keep up with every development. Wouldn't it be good to have all this curated content fed into a new Related Posts Search Engine? This Related Posts Engine would generate the best four articles on a similar topic to the one being read. It would still require curators, but their efforts would be multiplied by spreading their content gems throughout Steemit. The Related Posts Engine could follow all the myriad trails and curation groups and bring them together into a "super-trail".
If you have set up automatic voting for your favourite curators, that's fine and won't change, but this Related Posts Engine will put those articles in front of real reading humans who can upvote, comment and follow new authors.
Phase Three: Integration into Steemit
This one is for the future, but I think this would make a great permanent feature integrated into the Steemit User Interface (UI). It would probably be easier to program too if it was part of the UI as there would not be the limitations into what can be inserted into an article.
I would welcome contact from the site developers to pick up this idea and develop it.
The Here and Now: Development Time!
I have discussed this with a few people and I now throw this idea open to the Steemit community. All earnings from this post will go towards developing this concept. I am starting from scratch - from an idea, a brainwave I had 2 days ago!
If you agree with me that this is a great idea and would increase reading time and engagement and new friendships, then please upvote and resteem this article.
If you would like to develop this new app, then please get in touch and we can discuss its feasibility.
And finally, I have made a simple table mock-up of what the widget/app would look like at the bottom of an article. I hope it looks OK on all screens; if it doesn't, then my apologies, it just shows four small thumbnails and a truncated title of each post.
Related Posts...
Yeah man, this is great! You a dev guy or looking for help?
Looking for help to code this. I know, ideas can be cheap, but ideas are also important - such as blockchain protocols before they get encoded :-)
Hey man, I think this is a great idea! If you're on the discord, send me a message. I'm on there as cryptorob.
Thats something I considered for Insteem.
If you wanna discuss a bit, you'll find me on steemit.chat or discord ;)
Thanks @sarasate I'll find you in chat. Meanwhile, having a look at Insteem.
It is a great post. Thanks for sharing information. Keep it up.
Thanks a lot! Hopefully will start to get more feedback as Europe wakes up!
This sounds like a great plan. A good added feature is options for users where to place it or to keep it hidden and just provide a button to show the contents; or maybe they could opt in or opt out of it.
Thanks, I think the question has become whether it is feasible to insert this within a post - so that people opt-in merely by adding some code - or whether this has to be somewhere within the UI?
I don't think it's possible. I did some research last year on how to accomplish this and the only way I could determine how would be modifying the UI for steemit/chainbb/etc.
The only way I could come up with how to do it would be dynamically generated images (used as signatures basically), but that doesn't work either because all images get cached via steemitimages and don't refresh. That means old posts would never see updates and it would basically take a snapshot the first time you used that specific URL.
If we could get a whitelist of domains that prevented this caching in the UI layer - then using images would be possible :)
Thanks. The way widgets do it in blogs such as Wordpress or Blogger is to insert code in the "head" that allows javascript, then in the "body" of the post insert the js script. That then generates the thumbnails/title just as in the post streams on steemit and chainBB.
So yes, it needs code inserted into the UI, even though the block appears inside a post. I can show you the code run by LinkWithin - I have a copy.
So could be achieved in chainBB even if not in Steemit?
This has to be within the UI. Markdown is pretty limited. I don't think the post submissions will accept codes as complicated as this one (I don't know much about coding but I'm guessing it's gonna be like that).
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Heh. I like the way you think.
I'm a dev -- and thinking outside the box, I think that I have a way to do this so that it is easy for novices to do and doesn't require modifying steemit itself. Let me think on it further . . . .
I'm on discord as ethical-ai.
yep that is awesome, i'd totally use that.
This is absolutely a good idea! Really looking forward to this feature. I only know some basic coding stuffs so I will leave this to the real programmers :) Great job @rycharde!
Hi, thanks! Sadly, most devs seem to think it can't be done "within-posts" without it being integrated into the UI.
It will probably appear without my knowledge or credit! :-/ I should learn to code such things myself.
actually I agree with them ... this is going to be a huge project if you really want to build such feature. You may probably need a completely new viewer just like chainbb, which can show the suggested posts below a post. Just this step is already extremely time-consuming! You can't just change the UI of steemit.com unfortunately...