I’m such a dork it’s scary!
I’ve added a new oddity to Dorky Goodness today. It’s a related content plugin for Movable Type called Waypath. The idea is that the plugin will parse Waypath’s database and find related content from other folk’s blogs. But as we all know, searching and correlating human information is sometimes wonky!
And Waypath is not an exception. I’ve noticed that some of the “related” content is anything but. Granted, Dorky Goodness is a bit on the outside as far as what most folks blog about and it’s likely that the algorithm is doing its best. Hell, the more “normal” the post (like stuff from the AP dad category) tend to return with good results. The posts in the dork/game category tend to be ridiculously irrelevant.
Ah well. I’ll keep it running for a while just for kicks.
You can see the related content for any given post to Dorky Goodness by going to the bottom of the page on any individual post. I didn’t implement it on the Index or archive pages because I didn’t want to mess up the formatting.
4 Comments so far
Okay, I took this out for a bit to correct some formatting issues I’m having.
Okay, it’s back. I think it looks much nicer on the side, don’t you?
Yes, looks great up there! Thanks for trying out the Waypath plugin. I read your post a few days ago and realized that the then-current version of the plugin didn’t take extended entries into account when determining related posts — so I fixed that and there’s a new version of the Waypath MT plugin available here. If you get a chance, please give the new version a try (just replace the .pl file, that’s all). Maybe the Waypath Related Post Elves will be able to select better related posts with the new plugin version
Martin
“Waypath Customer Service”
martin
Much better. It’s grabbing content for some of our movie reviews (which have short entries and considerably longer extended text). Very nice.
Does the plugin look at keywords at all? That might be a decent thing to do. It could be a configurable option instead of a default setting. That way some of the extraneous text wouldn’t necessarily trigger a match.