Plugin: Smart link

Looks pretty neat, Denis – I’ll give it a shot…. though I’m pretty much that “nerdy software grunt”….

H??h?? ??

Would you by any chance be a genuine hacker in javascript? Because if you are, the plugin could definitly use the following javascript:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/33944

Nope. I actually am only a tweaker – if someone else has written code, I can occasionally make it do something I want it to do differently – and that does include tweaking js, but I certainly can’t write it up from scratch! One of these days, I’m going to have to learn to program….

Programming etc. is about the only stuff I don’t do – hard programming that is, I write html, css, and MUSH softcode….

Denis, tell me if I’m understanding your intentions for this plugin correctly please. The major use of Smart link is to simplify links to other URLs on one’s own site and to search engines and not especially for normal external links; for example, if I were to write an entry about Smart Link on my blog, the plugin doesn’t add much value.

Second, besides rel=nofollow, does it handle anchor tag attributes such as title?

The link title issue is quite complex and requires to understand the purpose of the plugin, which is to allow you to insert mutating links to data in your posts.

For instance, if you write a post about [C# programming->] today and have no data on it on your web site, then the link will fadder and be invisible. But as soon as you add a C# programming link to your bookmarks, all the references to C# programming will suddenly link to that. And when you eventually write posts on the topic, the links will all mutate and point to the latest relevant post.

Moreover, a future version of the plugin will feature link autodiscovery: This means it will identify the post’s key topics, and contextually insert links in the text based on feedback from user interactions.

Thus, it is very much impossible to determine what the data will be pointing to. So letting users hard code a link title is nonsense. Remains automatically inserting a title, which I’ve in mind in a future version. Namely, this would be the resource’s excerpt, link description, category description… at best with whatever is present.

Regarding external links, the plugin doesn’t add much value at the moment, but I’ve plans to enable distributed autolinking as soon as I find some time. Distributed smart linking could be achieved via XML-RPC, or via the API modules of search engines. In essence, the distributed link would let you write about a [book at amazon -> G??del, Escher, Bach @ amazon], and get a link to precisely that.

Er. Gosh, Denis – do you by chance work for google? Sounds a tad bit like some of the Autolink stuff….

not really… the google autolink is meant to insert ads in a text. google maintains who buys the keywords and where they get inserted.

the idea behind the smart link autodiscovery, which will work with my smart cluster and my smart track projects, is to create an AI module that maintains the blog in the background. more details shortly on the blog’s post — I’m starting a FAQ.

*laughing* S’okay, Denis – I was kidding…. there WAS a “smartlink” thing a few years back, from MS though I think – I don’t remember what it did….

np — I figure the question would have come up anyway, so I guess it’s not irrelevant to post a more or less detailed answer in the smart link faq. what more, it lets me expose a couple more projects i’ve in mind. ??

I’ve uploaded a beta-2. I fixed a tiny bug, and added a couple more search engines. ??

Perhaps a the link title is metadata held by the target of the link… Should be easy enough to achieve with wp’s postmeta table. You then get the best of both worlds: an auto link based on natural language and additional link scent in the title attribute provided by metadata from the target.

@tdw: Actually, I was thinking of retrieving the target page’s html/head/title and html/head/meta[@rel=description]. This requires some kind of caching, in postmeta or — more likely — in a more centralized location (to avoid scanning the same page 10x if the same link is in different posts).

A bug fix is available for download.

Noticed that the links are ‘invisible’ in the admin section when previewing the post in the ‘Write’ section

Yup, I’m aware. It’s on my todo list. ??