Have you spent much time adding posts thumbnails using custom fields.. or -like me- spent much time trying many plugins that either not working well or very limited.

I was always not convinced with "Read more" built-in option in WordPress. As it is very unlikely to use the starting portion of your post as a teaser or summary.

My first jQuery Plugin.. A 4KB jQuery plugin instead of a 118KB Google Blog Bar!!

I have shown before how to use Google Blog Bar as related posts widget, But when I actually tried to use it on my site, I didn't like all these JavaScript/CSS files that I've to include.
And since I already use jQuery -and who doesn't- I decided to rebuild the Blog Bar from scratch.

The Google AJAX Search API provides simple web objects that perform inline searches over a number of Google services (Web Search, Local Search, Video Search, Blog Search, News Search, Book Search, Image Search, and Patent Search).

It is an old news that: The API exposes a raw RESTful interface that returns JSON encoded results so it would be easily processed by most languages and runtimes.

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.