Related Posts for Blogger

Adding a list of related posts at the end of article is a tried and tested way to keep the visitors engaged with your blog for longer duration. It gives them a reason not to click the back button, thus increasing your blog's page views and average visit duration; and decreasing bounce rate.

There are plenty of related post widgets for Blogger but I was not satisfied with them (in fact, I am never satisfied with any piece of code). Therefore, I decided to write my own, with the following features:

• Light weight vanilla JavaScript code — no JavaScript framework required
• Customizable widget layout — just about everything can be styled using CSS
• Post thumbnails support — because a thumbnail image is worth a thousand words
• Google Analytics integration — clicks are logged in Google Analytics
• Lazy-loadable — the script can be loaded asynchronously
• Easy installation — does not require editing Blogger template

Retrieve Title, Description and Thumbnail of a YouTube Video Using JavaScript and AJAX

The YouTube Data API allows an application to interact with YouTube and perform a variety of operations; such as searching for videos, retrieve video information and upload a video on behalf of a user. The API also provides programmatic access to the video and user information stored on YouTube. This article demonstrates how you can retrieve information of a YouTube video (e.g. title, description, thumbnail, duration, views and rating) using the YouTube Data API and jQuery.

Starting from version 3, YouTube data API requires an application key and billing information just like Google maps. However, the API offers few million requests free each day. Authentication is not required for most read-only operations.