Unless I'm terribly rushed to post something, I usually take a few minutes to make my blog posts more reader friendly — or at least visually appealing. That means going through the post and linking names of people and companies to their respective web sites (or Wikipedia pages), adding an image or two, and so on. I appreciate it when authors I read take the effort to do this in their writing, so I try to do the same. But to be honest, it's kind of tedious. And being the lazy person I am, that means I often don't bother.

That's why the just released Yahoo! Shortcuts WordPress Plug-In caught my interest when I first got a look at it. Instead of putting the burden on me, it operates as an assistant in the background, looking for relevant links, images, and other shortcuts. Then, when you're done writing, you can simply look through what it found and select what you'd like to keep.

But words really don't quite capture what's going on. Check out this video demo and sceencast that we shot with Alex King (of CrowdFavorite, which created the plug-in) at the Defrag Conference in Denver last month.

As you see, the plug-in can grab Flickr photos, Maps (like of Zanzibar, where I'm getting married), Finance charts, as well as recognizing and suggesting links to popular products, autos, news personalities, and more.

With my Yahoo Developer Network hat on, I love seeing good tools that use our web service APIs to make life a little bit easier. Ariel Seidman has more on the plug-in over at the Yahoo! Search blog. If you're a WordPress blogger looking for tool to make life easier, check it out.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network