From Web Development

2 Important things to do after installing WordPress

I started using CMS with PHPnuke (before I learnt php), then B2evolution, then Movable Type and I assure you nothing beats the ease of Wordpress. However, the ease ends with the installation process and sooner or later any user will whine about the frequent software updates. If you do choose to use WordPress, you will be stuck in an endless loop of updates and the problem escalates with every installed plugin.

For this spanking new Linkcious Blog, we have decided to go with WordPress as we totally understand what we are getting ourselves into and Blogspot is out of the question for corporate purposes. So here are the customary 2 things that I usually do after a new installation because these are really important even if nobody reads my posts.

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Linkcious: The Facebook Recommendations Box on steroids

The Facebook Recommendations Box is not good enough because of these 5 points:

  1. The recommended links are not contextual. They are the same throughout your domain.
  2. You should use other social buttons (like Twitter and Pinterest) on your links and show information on these other buttons.
  3. Analytics information like click throughs are not heuristically feedbacked into the system to show better links.
  4. If you do not use Facebook Like buttons, tough luck. It’s because Facebook Recommendations Box will only show links that have been liked.
  5. There is another widget that can do all the above. You guessed it, it’s Linkcious.
We built Linkcious not because we wanted another related links widget, but because we cannot find a good related products widget that selects products (from any specified domain) contextually in a really precise manner. In building Linkcious, we have largely succeeded and in early beta, this widget works like a smooth criminal 80% of the time.

… then it hit us. The technology used to pick out related products must be far more accurate than any algorithm to generate recommended news. This is because recommended news articles may not need to be related or semantical at all.

But for the heck of it, let’s try to use Linkcious to generate related news and see what happens.

It turns out that Linkcious works very well as a contextual replacement for Facebook Recommendations Box. Early indication from A/B testing shows that the average click though rates from Linkcious is a whopping 8 times higher.

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