10 Responses to “Easier weblog linking”

1. Carthik says:
   January 9th, 2005 at 4:38 pm

   So when will the plugin(s) be made available to everyone?
   Just curious.

2. mx says:
   January 9th, 2005 at 7:32 pm

   Soon ;-)

   I was going to add several more bits to the script tonight, including one that will allow me to link to the script (automatically tar-ing it) easily. I need to relax the regexes a bit, to allow for optional spaces … which requires me to remember what the differences are between real Perl regexes, and PHP’s pregs … and then I was going to come up with some CSS to style the note/tip/comment tags nicely (outlined, coloured, with nifty icons).

3. Mike Greiner says:
   February 9th, 2005 at 8:46 pm

   I’m a blosxom user who’s thinking of making the switch to WordPress. I am heavily dependent on magiclinks in blosxom and have been searching for something similar for WordPress. Any ETA on releasing your plugin? I’d be glad to work with it in it’s current state and provide feedback. Thanks!

4. mx says:
   February 9th, 2005 at 9:14 pm

   You can download a very beta version of it here. It has some hard-coded pieces, and is likely riddled with bugs. Let me know if you fix anything ;-)

5. Mike Greiner says:
   March 2nd, 2005 at 9:51 am

   WRT enhancements to coincide with your WP 1.5 upgrade:

   1. Support magiclink.conf or similar. Under blosxom I use the magiclink.conf file quite a bit to define new tags. I’ve added tags for Google News, Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia, etc. I tend to customize the url and tmpl fields. I also added title and target fields in both the conf file and magiclink plugin. Here’s an example conf file entry:

   rt
   url = http://www.rottentomatoes.com/search/movie.php?search=%terms%
   target = _self
   ws  = %20
   tmpl = %terms%
   

   1. Continue some form of image linking. I combine your image.jpg format with textile markup to make nice little tables of thumbnails for quick photo galleries, ala these biking pictures. An easy way to style images with a class would be nice. I modified the plugin directly for this, but perhaps some combination of magic/simplelinks and textile?

   Thanks! Mike

6. mx says:
   March 2nd, 2005 at 10:20 am

   Yes, I had been planning to support configuration for the tool, but was slowed by translating it to php (the blosxom plugin was written in perl.

   Would you find it less useful if the configuration was moved to the datbase, with a simple administration interface? It’s quite a lot easier (and faster) to read the data from a database table … though it’s a bit less portable (an import/export might help that).

   Re: Image linking ..

   I added a few forms of image linking to the current WP plugin. When the image exists on the server, it displays it. When the image doesn’t exist, it provides a link to the wp-upload tool, so you can upload the image … something I use with the wp preview mode. I’ve been thinking of a way to make this work for galleries too, as it’s one of the use cases I’ve been mulling over.

   Anyway, thanks for the feedback, it’s gold!

7. Mike Greiner says:
   March 3rd, 2005 at 8:11 am

   Configuring simplelinks via a web interface that fits nicely with the WordPress Site Admin GUI would be fine. That approach would be consist with the WordPress environment, which already provides a lot of web-based administration. In the blosxom world it’s pretty natural to just edit a text config file.

   I’m still not sold on moving to WordPress, but I have a 1.5 install to play with and will be glad to try your plugin when it is available.

   As an aside: One thing that’s preventing my WordPress adoption is the WordPress Category system. In my blosxom blog, I’ve got a category (topic) and sub-category layout, combined with breadcrumbs, that I really like. Makes it easy, I think, to look at specific topics and know exactly what topic/sub-topic of the blog you’re reading. Not sure if my readers use the categories, but I use them all the time and am my #1 reader. Ha.

   Also, it strikes me as odd that parent categories in WordPress don’t “inherit” their children blog entries unless I explicity assign the entries to the parent category. A post in Technology::Linux won’t show up if I select the Technology category unless I assign it to both Technology and Linux. Anyway, there may be work-arounds but blosxom (+plugins) handles this just as I want.

   Thanks again, Mike

8. Mike Greiner says:
   March 6th, 2005 at 9:16 pm

   So I just started using the early release of magiclinks.php with my WordPress 1.5 install. Here’s something that would be nice:

   IMDB

   …where “|IMDB” provides the link text. This is similar to what you provide in the warpedvision/test example above. I’d like to define link text for shortcut links like google, imdb, and my own user-defined styles (like Rotten Tomatoes).

   It would also be cool to style the resulting link title text, so the link could say “Star Wars IV at IMDB” and such.

   Mike

9. Mike Greiner says:
   March 7th, 2005 at 8:06 am

   Interestingly Textile2 can do pretty much what I want:

   “IMDB(Winged Migration at IMDB)”:imdb:Winged+Migration

   …creates an IMDB search link w/the text “IMDB” and the link title “Winged Migration at IMDB”. The plugin has a google shortcut and a couple others. I added my own Rotten Tomatoes shortcut to the code and it worked fine.

   No external config file w/Textile either, but similar functionality to what we’ve discussed for simplelinks. Just an FYI.

   Mike

10. mx says:
    March 8th, 2005 at 10:13 am

    Thanks. I noticed that the Markdown markup/plugin have a similar feature too (maybe more similar to the ReStructuredText tool). I ended up deciding to offer a smaller set of functions and use SimpleLink along side Markdown. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much coding time on the weekend, so it will be delayed by a few days.

 

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