Shortcuts for your WordPress blog

Posted December 13th, 2007 at 6:00 am by Jeremy Zawodny, Yahoo! Developer Network

 22 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

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

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22 Comments Add your own

marc | December 13th, 2007 at 7:27 am

Truly an awesome utility! Congratulations to the team that put this together… Next on the roadmap?… Typepad!!! :)

Tim Ginn | December 13th, 2007 at 10:51 am

This is pretty neat; I upgraded my version of WordPress just to try it and expect that it will improve the quality of my posts. One thing that I noticed it doesn’t automatically link well is terms that don’t fall into one of the broad categories of countries/place names. I’m a university student so it’s not uncommon that I’ll write about one of my courses referring to it by the course code (for example CISC497). Yahoo! search is good about finding these course websites as the first result for a general search so I was hoping the shortcut plugin would be able to pick up on the course code and link it to the course website; but, so far it hasn’t done that.

Ina | December 13th, 2007 at 11:02 am

I too think this utility will be of great use for those of us who blog using WordPress. It’s one of the reasons I like WordPress so much! There are so many great tools to help us track performance and popularity of our blogs, and make them more interactive (not to mention they rank highly in search results, so I’m for that)!

I also try to link to names, sites and other blogs that I feel are relevant. I want my readers to get their info from a variety of sources and recognize my blog for helping them do that. This tool will make that task so much easier! I hope they keep the great development going!

mike | December 13th, 2007 at 11:17 am

really cool.. works well so far, good job!!

dfb | December 13th, 2007 at 2:44 pm

Feature request: I’d like the Flickr photo chooser to also show my Flickr photos to choose from, including those that are private or hidden to friends. Or maybe this is just a stand alone plugin to request from the Flickr team. :)

Otherwise, this is a nice feature to have.

Joe Beaulaurier | December 13th, 2007 at 4:58 pm

If only it worked with the Yahoo!-hosted WordPress solution (http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/problogs.php). The Y!-hosted version of WP is 2.0.2 and this plugin requires version 2.2 or higher.

sondan | December 13th, 2007 at 6:44 pm

I like Wordpress a lot too and would like to export my soon to be
defunct Yahoo 360 blog into a WordPress blog. But no one has been able to help with this this. I have written Word Press about helping but nothing has happened to date and Yahoo no longer supports the Y360 users.

So if anyone has any idea on how to make this happen (OTHER THAN CUTTING AND PASTING EVeRY SINGLE BLOG ENTRY) I would love to hear from you.

Thanks in advance.
son.dan1@yahoo.com

Thomas Arie | December 14th, 2007 at 6:06 am

I tried it, and it’s really nice! My favorite part is the Flickr photo search. Thanks for the plugin!

Riihele | December 14th, 2007 at 9:42 am

Hei there Folks

Fabulous for i really like my page on WordPress where i copy my entries on Y360 so this should make it easy peasy Japanese!!
Have a super weekend. Rii :)

Astra Navigo | December 14th, 2007 at 11:59 am

I’m wondering if this portal will wind up as a part of the Universal Profile System which Yahoo is rolling out as a replacement for Y/360 around the first of the year?

Most of the Yahoo product-blogs are Wordpress-hosted now….

Hmmm….?

paul | December 15th, 2007 at 11:45 am

oh wow, i had no idea this existed! what a great idea. it does get really tedious adding all that stuff into a post. i especially like the flickr deal. thanks for this.

gag | December 16th, 2007 at 5:58 am

interesting

Claude | December 18th, 2007 at 12:00 pm

Thanks for this plugin

Lucy | December 21st, 2007 at 5:00 am

This is a great utility for WordPress bloggers

SEO | December 22nd, 2007 at 4:29 am

great stuff. well done.

Sondan | January 1st, 2008 at 1:44 am

Since my question hasn’t been answered I get the feeling that Yahoo is not reading any of these posts. So I will ask again just to see - what about wordpress users who are being hosted by wordpress?, i.e., we can’t use plug-ins. Is there any hope that we will be able to import out y360 blogs into WordPress?.

Thank You

Dog | January 10th, 2008 at 2:47 pm

Thanks! This is one of the best plugins so far!

Sondan | January 22nd, 2008 at 2:52 pm

Again - Is there going to be someway to IMPORT Y360 blogs into Wordpress once the Universal Profile Blogging replacement for our Y360 blogs is implemented?

I would like to suggest this be done please.

Domain | January 28th, 2008 at 1:04 am

Very good information

Built From Skratch | February 18th, 2008 at 4:46 am

Just wanted to say hello and great blog!

unioncanal | February 18th, 2008 at 12:09 pm

Hi,

Does anyone have the same issue with the plugin as posted over here - http://wordpress.org/support/topic/157222 - lack of rendering of the plugin on Wordpress search or category view of topics.

Regards

J

Gractatly | February 24th, 2008 at 7:32 am

To me it is necessary to find