NEEDLES IN A HAYSTACK
It's been a while since I've requested a feature from Typepad, the service that hosts this blog.
Having now built-up a collection of posts of dubious value over the course of the last two years, I often find myself manually searching for posts I've written in the past. The goal being to then link them to a current post on the same subject.
Case in point, is yesterday's post on Google and Apple.
It'd be great if Typepad could auto-search a blog's archives on a blog title and/or post, and present a list of previous posts that mention the two companies or a specific term in the post.
The author could then select some relevant posts, say via check boxes, and they'd be automatically listed at the bottom of the post as "relevant posts" that may be of interest to readers.
Online newspapers and magazines have this feature all the time. It'd be great to have this feature for humble bloggers.
The increasingly limited structure of today's blogs and most commercial blog templates don't make it easy for readers to find posts in an archive.
The best we get most of the time is an auto-generated list of "recent posts". It's not even a list of "most popular" or "most-read" posts, which some blogs generate with the help of third-party services, and some geeky "cut-and paste" of HTML and/or Javascript code.
But there should be a way to re-present older posts in new contexts.
Ironically, I find that an increasing amount of this blog's traffic comes from searches done on the major search engines, surfacing posts that are months old and buried deep in this blog's archives, but still generate mainstream user interest, readership, and comments.
Just a thought, Typepad.
Thanks.
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