{"id":425,"date":"2009-03-10T00:07:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-10T00:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/?p=425"},"modified":"2009-03-10T00:07:00","modified_gmt":"2009-03-10T00:07:00","slug":"miscellaneous-monday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/?p=425","title":{"rendered":"Miscellaneous Monday"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m running a tad short of time today so I’m taking the easy way out. Mama Kat<\/a> and others have been touting the LinkWithin<\/a> widget, so I decided to give it a try.\u00c2\u00a0The installation was easy. Just click on the “get this widget” link below and follow the bouncing two step ball.<\/p>\n

Now being a techno geek at heart, my real goal was to see if it does a very good job of picking posts out of the archive to link with. Given that I often have a hard time finding the post I want to link to even when I know the wording of the post, this blog could be a challenge to the LinkWithin<\/a> heuristics. (And see, you just knew I couldn’t\u00c2\u00a0resist\u00c2\u00a0using heuristic, just like I had to use\u00c2\u00a0canonical\u00c2\u00a0the last time I talked about search.)<\/i> By looking at what it does and what the LinkWithin site<\/a> says, it’s pretty clear that they do a crawl of your archives and then select matches to the current post from the archive posts. Since it takes them some finite amount of time to do that initial crawl, I’d expect that one would see changing selections with each refresh until the crawl was done. I’d also expect that there is some degree of randomness in the selection, so that each display of the blog might get a different set of links displayed.<\/p>\n

When I installed the widget, I immediately started a series of refreshes in other browser windows. The earliest refreshes did indeed return pretty much random stuff, but later displays sometimes seemed a bit more on topic. I’m still undecided about the true effectiveness of the links suggested. My experience thus far is that the proverbial “10,000 monkeys typing on 10,000 typewriters for 1 million years will reproduce hamlet”<\/i> type of randomness seems to be at the forefront in the selection process. If that indeed remains the case over the coming days, \u00c2\u00a0the lifespan of the widget may very short here.<\/p>\n

So that is where you all come in. I’m going to leave the widget enabled through the rest of this week and then post a poll to see whether it stays or goes. (Anyone with the widget installed interested in running a multi-site poll?)<\/i> So pay attention and be prepared for a quiz after class! {*grin*}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m running a tad short of time today so I’m taking the easy way out. Mama Kat and others have been touting the LinkWithin widget, so I decided to give it a try.\u00c2\u00a0The installation was easy. Just click on the “get this widget” link below and follow the bouncing two step ball. Now being a … Continue reading Miscellaneous Monday<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}