Wordpress plugin Related Posts Thumbnails

Today my Wordpress plugin “Related Posts Thumbnails” has been approved and released.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/related-posts-thumbnails/

Read more information about this plugin here:

http://wordpress.shaldybina.com/plugins/related-posts-thumbnails/

This plugin has been successfully used for several months in one of my blogs. Visitors tend to click on the related posts teasers, increasing page views significantly.

I was initially inspired by LinkWithin widget, which I installed on my blog first. LinkWithin is a Javascript widget that collects all post images, resizes them, stores them on its own servers and displays them when you scroll down to the end of the post. Overall, it is a great widget that can be installed on every platform and supports externally stored images. However, there were several issues I couldn’t fix. Here are the few:

• I experienced an increased page latency due to the loading of this Javascript and external images, It slowed down my site performance in a browser (in addition to Google FriendConnect, AddThis widget, ads and featured posts slideshow).
• Its dynamic HTML rendering provided some unwanted “flickering” effect below every post.
• It kept showing links and thumbnails of deleted posts.
• Relation is based on post titles — not tags or categories.
• For several of my posts it skipped the first image and displayed the second one as a thumbnail.
• Even when I changed my post images completely it kept displaying the old ones.
• It was actually hard to get response from their support.
• I couldn’t change the colors and size of my thumbnails.

So here is my plugin for Wordpress:

• It uses built-in Wordpress taxonomy — categories and tags.
• It generates static page HTML, so search engines can actually see it.
• Colors, font preferences and default image can be customized.
• Only published posts are displayed.
• It is based on built-in Wordpress post thumbnails feature, that allows to customize thumbnails size hosted on server.

Wordpress plugin “Generate Post Thumbnails”

Today my first Wordpress plugin was released at Wordpress - Generate Post Thumbnails.

This plugin helped me to automatically generate post thumbnails for existing posts on my Wordpress blog and I hope it will help somebody else.

Plugin page for more information:

http://wordpress.shaldybina.com/plugins/generate-post-thumbnails/