cre8d design

Auto links is an incredibly handy plugin which I came across recently and is now being used over at Names@Work.

If you’re find yourself linking to the same sites/areas of your site over and over in your posts, this plugin will save you time.

It will enable you to set up key words which will be automatically linked to the site/page you specify. It will also enable you to turn key words into Amazon searches (along with your associate ID). An incredibly handy feature is that you can track statistics on which links people are clicking on.

Names@Work is using this specifically to set up an internal glossary of SEO terms. Probloggers might find this useful for linking to sites/products they’re writing about often. You could even set it up to link to your blog’s search results for that term.

Auto links is a great example of a plugin which uses WordPress’ filter functionality. The plugin doesn’t actually alter the text of your posts in your database, it adds them just before displaying. So, if you turn off the plugin, your posts return to how you initially wrote them.

If a site you auto link to often changes its address, no need to search-and-replace all your old posts to fix the links: you’ll be able to change them all in one quick step. If you switch affiliates, that’s simple too.

Oh, and the support forum (while it looks quiet) is well-attended to by the plugin’s helpful author.

I’ve now put up the code for the plugin used to create the TechCrunch Index.

Installation

1. Check you have Ultimate Tag Warrior installed and activated
2. Download the plugin and rename from cre8d_tags_in_columns.txt to cre8d_tags_in_columns.php
3. Activate the plugin.
4. Access the listing by including echo cre8d_UTW_TagArchive(); somewhere in your template. This will give, by default, 3 columns and tags grouped vertically in 5′s. If you wanted 2 columns and groups of ten, use: cre8d_UTW_TagArchive(2,10) and so forth.
5. Add to your stylesheet the following:

   .list-column { float: left; width: 160px; margin: 0 5px; }
.list-column ul { margin-left: 0; padding-left: 0; }
.list-column ul li { list-style-type: none; }
.spacer { margin-bottom: 20px; }


6. Optionally tweak the width of .list-column to suit your blog’s layout. You may like to change the vertical spacing (.spacer) between groups too.

I thought I’d share a little plugin I’ve been using that I recently wrote, because I wasn’t happy with the default display of trackbacks in WordPress. If you have any problems, please let me know.

This plugin changes the display of trackbacks from:

[...] Trackback text [...]

to something a little more readable – I have it producing:

Trackback text …

but you could change the plugin code to suit your tastes, just change $pre and $post to what you’d like to appear before and after trackbacks.

Download
http://www.cre8d-design.com/code/rvc_trackback.txt

Changes
3 Jan 06: Version 1