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Displaying links to "related posts" beneath individual entries on our blogs is a tried and trusted method of providing useful and interesting reading material for our readers. I've written about several different methods which Blogger users can choose to display related posts - all of which perform their function well enough. But after seeing several of my favourite sites displaying links to related items with thumbnails using LinkWithin's free service, I was intrigued to discover how well this may be adapted for use with Blogger. About LinkWithin LinkWithin is a free service offered by a small team based in New York. This free service enables us to display related posts with thumbnails below our blog posts (the thumbnail is taken from an image within the post it links to). We retrieve and index all stories from your blog archive, not just recent stories, making them accessible to new or casual readers of your blog who would not otherwise encounter them. The pos...

While browsing around looking for more Blogger gadgets to add to the directory, I discovered an awesome feature offered by Google Friend Connect: the Recommended (Popular) Posts Gadget. This is a feature which I'm sure we've all been waiting for! While we have seen various implementations of popular posts gadgets in the past, I've found these are not as useful or easy to configure as I'd prefer. In contrast, the Friend Connect Recommended Gadget stable, reliable and quickly updates. Being developed and hosted by Google ensures this is unlikely to suffer issues, and once installed it's very easy for your blog readers to recommend their favourite posts. Want to see how it works? Take a look in the sidebar to see a list of posts recommended by readers, and scroll down to the bottom of this post for the button you can use to vote (this appears on every page of , so feel free to recommend any other posts you may like!). Those of you reading this in a feed r...

If you use a third party template or customize the design of your blog, chances are you'll need to find hosting for images used in the design. Many Blogger designers use Photobucket, Flickr and other free image hosting solutions. It's also possible (albeit unnecessarily complicated) to upload images to Blogger or Google Sites. But my personal favoured image hosting service is Picasa Web Albums . This free Google powered service offers unlimited bandwidth and a generous 1gb of storage - perfect for serving up any images you need for template visualisation. If you already host a blog with Blogger, any images which you upload to your blog posts will already be hosted on Picasa Web Albums in folders according to your blog name, even if you haven't already activated your Picasa account. Simply go to the Picasa Web Albums home page and log in using your Google account. Once logged in, you'll see all of your Picasa hosted albums, including any which are utilized fo...