These days, blogging is as much about intuitive UI and good SEO as content, so using the right tools is key. Don't let your ideas get buried in web obscurity; boost your blog with the best software for you and your audience.

A new edition of my jQuery plugin -Related Posts widget for Google Blogger- that is loaded with pretty new features like posts thumbnails and transition effects..

Displaying related posts is a smart way for keeping your site visitors around and with thumbnails it is even smarter!

Google Blogger just Added another feature to show commenter avatar! So again. this is great, but if you have a customized template the avatars won't show up. So how to fix that..

Google Blogger has added new feature, an easy way to show posts summaries on your blog index page! But if you still don't see the "read more" link like I did! Google knows why, But I had to dig into it a little bit more..

After Google Blogger 10th anniversary.. Google Blogger promises that many of our dreams as Bloggers will come true so soon.. by dreams I mean "Product Ideas for Blogger" which Google has launched on last April to collect users votes & feature requests on blogger.

Previously, I proposed a related posts widget for Blogger based on Blogger Data API .
This time will do simple adjustments on 2 Google AJAX Search API controls to work as related posts widgets. which should work on any blog as opposed to the previous method which was limited to Blogspot blogs only.

What is the Google AJAX Search API?

The Google AJAX Search API lets you put Google Search in your web pages with JavaScript. You can embed a simple, dynamic search box and display search results in your own web pages or use the results in innovative, programmatic ways :)

On this post I gonna walk you through the code behind my new widget [A Smarter Related Posts widget for Blogger].

If you just want to install the widget on your blog, go to A Smarter Related Posts widget for Blogger.

To see the widget in action, Scroll down to the end of this post. also hover on links to see relevancy score.

Displaying a related posts is a smart way for keeping your site visitors around. and you may have seen other Related Posts Widgets out there.. but this one will be Easier and Smarter.

* Check Out New Edition
of this widget that is loaded with pretty new features like posts thumbnails and transition effects..

Check features list:

1. Easier : since All of the work is(has to be) done on the client side, You will not need to modify your template at all. widget will read post tags that blogger already display with each post.
2. Smarter : Cause This widget will list the top related 5(or more) posts sorted by relevancy!Top relevant posts are the posts that have more tags in common with the current post.
3. More Optimized: Will only use summary feeds instead of querying default feeds that return full contents!
4. This widget also can work as a recent posts widget when there is no tags to aggregate.
5. Can be also used to get related posts from another blogspot blog. And in that case you don't have to run it on a blogspot!
6. A fixed list of tags can be used to aggregate.
7. It can display loading text or icon until widget is loaded.
8. Related posts list can be styled based on relevancy!
9. You can specify either to load widget on document ready or on window load.
10. Widget will be attached to container specified or it will be placed where you made the JavaScript call.

To see the widget in action, Scroll down to the end of this post. also hover on links to see relevancy tip.

for those who want or can only use JavaScript to convert regular tags list into a Tag-Cloud. jQuery and regular expressions are here to help.
Why Tag-Cloud? It is better looking and more meaningful.

Update:
Since Aug. 25, 2009: blogger now offers a built-in Tag-cloud. So you won't need this code for that job. still, jQuery manipulation is cool :)

I had a recent experience with changing my blogger template.. Now it is time to share some tricks to simplify things with next one trying to change it.. cause you should do it especially if you are still working with those 800x600 built-in blogger templates.

Meta keywords are very important to do better SEO for your blog.. And you should know that Search engines look for different description and keywords for each page of your site. If you put the same thing across all pages of your site, search engines may regard this as spam.

I saw lots of examples on how to add meta title/description based on the post title for Blogger/Blogspot. but I couldn't find one for using labels/Tags as meta keywords for each post.