bsuggestive and bsuite Tag Support

bsuite, the follow-up to bstat, now includes a module called “bsuggestive” that recommends related posts based on the current post’s tags or alternate posts based on your search words when you arrive from a recognized search engine.

That is, bsuggestive does two neat things:

First, visitors will see a section in each post with links to other posts on your site that have similar content. The “similarity” is judged by comparing the current posts tags against the content and titles of all other posts in the database. This requires tags, and I’ll explain that later.

Second: visitors who arrive at your site from a search engine will see a list of other posts that closely match the original search words used at that search engine. This is especially helpful when people arrive at your front page or an archive page that may include a number of posts not related to the search query.

The big downside to all of this is that it (at least part of it) requires tags, and there’s no standardized support for tags in WordPress.

What to do? Easy: bsuite automatically recognizes any links with a rel=“tag” attribute as a tag. A little iffy: bsuite has adopted the simpletags approach to tagging. This is “iffy” because you should disable the simpletags plugin if you’re already using it (running both will needlessly increase CPU usage, but won’t do anything “bad”).