It seems to be a WordPress habit. Friday afternoon rolls around, time to spring another feature on a million unsuspecting bloggers just in time for support to high-tail it to the dude ranch for the weekend.
Latest addition hard on the heels of the wildly successful upgrade of early April is the addition of Possibly Related Posts. It’s being billed as a way of leading readers elsewhere to posts that might be about the same thing you have written.
The operative word you have to keep in mind is Possibly.
A quick survey of the links now inserted at the bottom of a couple of my posts include:
- A link to a crime story set in Indonesia on a post about the strange language I speak with my brother Gordon.
- A link to a story about some guy whose dad was a tv repairman in the same post
- And three well-meaning but somehow not-at-all-related posts about shift work tacked on to my most recent post about being refused a ride in a taxi in the middle of the night.
Other bloggers have had the ultimate creep-out: one complained in the forum of links to porn inappropriate content, for example.
If you’re not happy with links appearing on your blog you never chose and have no control over, there is fortunately a way to disable it. Go into your dashboard and click on Design, then Extras. A page will pop up. Check the box marked: Hide related links on this blog.
But to give WordPress credit, they are saying that over the coming days we’ll be allowed to tweak the results to our liking. Hopefully that will include the ability to filter out the crap. Not a bad idea, but one that should have been there from the beginning.
© 2008 lettershometoyou
The banner photograph shows the town of Britannia Beach, BC, Canada, where I grew up. It's home. But I don't live there anymore.
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