Just for You Personalizes Your WordPress Blog

Every blogger knows that most of their traffic comes via referrals. Whether it's from a search engine, link from another blog, or via a tinyurl embedded in someone's tweet - readers flow across your site dropping by to graze on something that caught their eye then are off again just as quickly as they came.

Various plug-ins are out there to give readers a reason to hang out a bit longer on your site. Some of them present a list of similar posts from your archives, another creates a dynamic list of all-time popular posts so the viewers can browse your greatest hits.

Yet, none of these add-ons look at the stated interests of the individual reader, mostly because this data is closed off, hidden inside social networks and closed off to the open internet.

Just for You, released today as a WordPress plug-in, builds a list of headlines based on the expressed interests of the reader. The plug-in looks at each visitor to your blog and, if they are a cookied MyBlogLog member, looks up the tags attached to that user's profile. Using these tags, Just for You looks into the blog's archive for posts with matching tags or categories and shows a list of matching headlines in a sidebar widget.

The plug-in is configurable. You can also weight the recency and tag matching logic to determine the headlines you'd like to show. The idea is to engage readers with related content that's of interest to them. It's an innovation that cannot really be appreciated until you see how it performs for different users. Below are two sets of headlines presented by the Just for You plug-in from my personal blog, everwas by two different users.

Top tags are MyBlogLog and Yahoo!

Top tags are Alameda and Japan

If the reader is not a MyBlogLog user, Just for You will present a list of headlines using the collective tags of recent MyBlogLog visitors which it uses as a proxy to determine interests of the current reader. Just for You was built by Mani Kumar and Saurabh Sahni from our Yahoo! Bangalore offices who took the original concept and added much of their own semantic matching pixie dust. A patent has been filed.

Powering Just for You is The MyBlogLog API which is completely open so that developers can build hooks in to take advantage what MyBlogLog users share on their profile. Take a look at what Lijit (adds your blog url on signup page) and Thingfo (pre-filling in registration fields) are doing to personalize the user experience. As Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb says in his post about Just for You,

Just For You is a great example of what this API can do. There are countless companies that have raised millions in venture capital to offer publishers recommendation systems for their readers - commercial publishers pay big money for this functionality. Now bloggers can have the same type of thing for free and base recommendations on the self-identified interests of their readers. That's really powerful.

If you're a MyBlogLog user, visit everwas.com and see what comes up in the Just for You box in the sidebar. If you're running a hosted WordPress blog, install the plug-in and let us know with a trackback to this post so we can follow it over to your blog and leave comments on your post on what comes up for each of us.

Comments

[Summer Fey Foovay]

I installed and followed the instructions on the readme.txt but all I get is a link to MyBlogLog profile.

[Ian Kennedy]

By default the plug-in shows "0" headlines (we should change that). Did you specify a number of headlines in the widget configuration next to "Number of posts to show"?

[Saurabh Sahni]

@Foovay: It seems your host is not supporting json data format. Please ask your hosting provider to enable json extension for php.

[Martin Malden]

I have the same problem as Summer Fewy Foovay - and I did specify 5 posts to show. My hosting provider doesn't support the json extension, so I guess there's not much I can do.

Cheers,

Martin.

[cindy taylor]

Thanks for the info!

[Krispijn Beek]

I installed the plug-in and activated it on my blog, but the widget doesn't show up in the 'Available widgets' list. Might that be a json extension problem too? My site is hosted by Siteground, they state they don't block any php script. I ain't a techy (that's why I like MyBlogLog), so any help will be appreciated.

[John Dilbeck]

This looks like an outstanding idea for a plug-in.

When I went to everwas.com, all it showed for me were the last five posts.

Since I'd never paid much attention to my tags at MyBlogLog, I added a few tags to my profile.

When I reloaded Everwas.com, the recommended articles were right on target.

So, I installed it on my blog, 21st Century Affiliate Marketing, in the right column, and I'm seeing what others here are seeing.

It shows only a link to MyBlogLog.

I've tried setting it to 3, 5, and 6 links and have used the Auto, 1, 5, and 10 settings for the other two choices.

Nothing is showing up.

My blog is hosted by HostGator and I've never had any problems related to PHP on any of my domains hosted there.

I hope you'll find a way to make this work for more of us.

In the meantime, I'll deactivate the plugin.

Act on your dream!

JD

[Day Trading Computers]

This blog is amazing! You have the best plugins, info etc. I'm learning a lot. Thanks!!

[Marco]

The Plug-in isn't working for me either.
It tries to call ...blog url.../wp-content/plugins/... I have a mod_rewrite rule which is re-directing all requests going to /wp-content/... to index.php. I think this is the "basic" mod_rewrite rule wordpress comes with.

Is this why the plug-in is not showing anything, the request (/wp-content/plugins/mybloglog-justforyou/includes/disp_posts.php?tags=...) is going nowhere (more specific to index.php?

Am I right?

Haven't looked any further yet. Maybe adding a rewrite rule might help...

[Marco]

I figured out my problem, I had only read access enabled for the Apache user. The Plug-in (sitting on your web page, making the request) wants to read from the plugins/just-for-you/includes/ dir. Make sure you have "world" read access enabled for this (and the just-for-you) dir, e.g. do a chmod 755.

Hope this helps! Cheers, Marco