HOWTO: Another Diigo Blogging Tool
One of the downsides of using a hosted blog site like Blogger, WordPress.com or Typepad is the limited plugin options available. WordPress.com users were looking forward to a promised “related posts” feature, but once it became available it wasn’t quite what they expected. One expert on WordPress – hosted and otherwise – is Lorelle Van Fossen. She includes “Related Articles” lists on many of her posts and I was surprised to discover she does it manually. There just had to be a better way. Turns out, there is – and it involves my favorite research tool, Diigo.
The first step is to get in the habit of bookmarking all your significant posts in Diigo. Tagging is the key to making all this work so you’ll need to use a consistent set of tags to describe the contents of your posts. Now, when you need to generate a list of related articles for a current post, here’s what you do (click on each image for full-size view):
- In Diigo, filter your bookmarks using your tags. In this example I used the “fmarticle” and “toolbox” tags. I got 10 results.
- You may not want to include all results in your list. Select the ones you do want using the checkbox in front of each bookmark, then choose the Extract Annnotations option from the More Actions drop-down menu.
- Now you have a list of your selected bookmarks. Click on the Copy button to copy the HTML code for your list.
- Paste this code into the appropriate location on your blog post. You are pasting HTML code so you’ll need to use whatever feature your platform provides for including HTML. You’ll also want to include a heading for your list. Your result will look something like this.
Related Articles List Example
Family Matters » » Research Toolbox: The Newsreader
Family Matters » » Research Toolbox: Yahoo Account
Family Matters » » Research Toolbox: PDF Reader and Creator
Family Matters » » Research Toolbox: A Google Account
Family Matters » » Research Toolbox: Lulu Publishing Service
Family Matters » » Research Toolbox: Skype Account
Family Matters » » Mobile Research: Taking Notes
Family Matters » » Screen Capture
The Diigo Extract Annotations tool is designed to pull out the link and any annotations (highlighted text and/or notes) you included with the bookmark. You could put this to use to include your own descriptions of each article’s contents.
There are several ways you can customize your list. When Diigo bookmarks a page, it uses the page’s title as the name displayed in the bookmark. You can change that title – either while bookmarking or later – to better reflect the contents of the page. In this case, I could have removed the “Family Matters » »” that is automatically included by my blog software. And, while I only pulled out Family Matters articles in this example, I could just as easily include articles from other sources.
Providing a related articles list adds value to your posts and helps your readers find other articles about your topic. Diigo helps make it easy to offer this service on your blog.
Related posts:
April 28th, 2008 at 8:11 am
This is a really great tip Denise. It makes me want to go back to using Diigo! My problem is I start with one type of bookmarking system and then I learn about something cool you can do with a different type of bookmarking system and I switch. I tell myself that this time I will commit and stay with the new system but that only lasts until the next good idea comes along somewhere else. LOL! So I have a bunch of bookmarks in de.licio.us, a bunch more in Diigo, and a good number in Google Notebook. And I can never find anything!!! LOL!
April 28th, 2008 at 8:11 am
This is a really great tip Denise. It makes me want to go back to using Diigo! My problem is I start with one type of bookmarking system and then I learn about something cool you can do with a different type of bookmarking system and I switch. I tell myself that this time I will commit and stay with the new system but that only lasts until the next good idea comes along somewhere else. LOL! So I have a bunch of bookmarks in de.licio.us, a bunch more in Diigo, and a good number in Google Notebook. And I can never find anything!!! LOL!
April 28th, 2008 at 8:31 am
Not to worry. With Diigo you can simultaneously bookmark in several platforms – including del.icio.us. I’m no SEO expert, but won’t that help the search rankings in the process? ;)
April 28th, 2008 at 8:31 am
Not to worry. With Diigo you can simultaneously bookmark in several platforms – including del.icio.us. I’m no SEO expert, but won’t that help the search rankings in the process? ;)
April 29th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
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April 29th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
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May 25th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
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May 25th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
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