[New Plugin] Alexify

interesting. after the impressions limit is reached, i guess IE users get the big red X?

for anyone (like me) who had no idea what they’re talking about, LOL

hold your mouse over links on http://blog.calevans.com and a nifty little screenshot pops up

Hey, Cal,

We really like your plugin Alexify, and it works great for any link on the main part of our website as long as the link fulfills two criteria:
1. It must have the name of the link as the link ( such as ” http://www.apple.com ” ) but it won’t work with ” Apple.com ” which is linked to that site. We’ve tried it with several big named companies and it has that same issue with all of them.

2. The link must open in the same window as our blog. If the plugin runs into any html which tells the link to open in a new window, no thumbnail will show up, but as sure as the _blank tag is removed, the thumbnail works fine.

Also, none of the links on sidebars work with this plugin. At least not on our site, which is http://www.artondisk.com .

Do you have any plans to work on this or does anyone know of a workaround that can fix these issues? We really like the concept and think your idea is great. Thanks! Richard Nichols

Hi Cal,
My site is at http://www.artondisk.com . A good example of where the plugin works on one hand and not on another is at this permalink:

http://www.artondisk.com/?p=55

As you will notice, there are a number of links on the page to various well-known sites but the only link that shows a thumbnail of a site is the one just below Flickr. It is a link to Android Technologies. For some reason, it works fine, but Flickr doesn’t and neither does Webopedia or Wikipedia.

Anyway, this is a very cool idea and I don’t really expect you to spend a lot of time figuring it out, but if you happen upon the solution, my email address is computerfriend@hotmail.com or you can contact us through the artondisk.com site. We are still working on this so it isn’t a fully functioning site yet. In other words, we haven’t announced it to the rest of the world until we get most of the stable content in place.

Thanks!
Richard at Art on Disk Corp.

Thanks for trying this for me, Cal. I am no expert when it comes to these things. I usually un-tar a file using WinRar on my Windows XP PC. In this case, I un-tarred your file, and found one file inside it called wp-alexify which I renamed “wp-alexify.php” and copied it into my wp-content/plugins/ folder in WordPress after de-activating and uninstalling the alexify.php file I was using before.

While I can see your plugin just fine inside my WordPress console, when I activate it I get this message: plugins/blogbling/wp-alexify.php0100644000100100010010000001472410373742762017444 0ustar calevanscalevans

Now, to begin with I don’t know how to un-tar a tarball any other way than I am but so far it has worked every other time I’ve tried by just untarring it into a folder on my desktop and then ftp-ing the file or files whereever they need to go.

However, I don’t want to waste your time (in the same way all my clients waste my time) by not following directions in the first place. Maybe I will go back and re-read your instructions and see what I can do differently, because I am missing something. Again, thanks. This will be great when I get it working right and I’m sure my blog readers will like it too. Richard at Art on Disk …

Hey, Cal,

Ok, I did try this out and it doesn’t give me any error messages but I am still not able to see most of the links as thumbnails. We are such wuss’s here– we don’t want people to navigate away from our blog so we make all or most of the links open in a new window, but that seems to be why it doesn’t work. I tried it on our Macs as well as our PCs. Safari pretty much shows us the same phenomenon, it can make a thumbnail as long as the link isn’t going to open in a new window.

You can visit our test site at http://www.artondisk.com/backroom and see your plugin working for a number of the links down the page, but then when it gets to cnn.com it stops, because that opens up a new window.

Anyway, this is interesting technology and I appreciate your efforts, whether in the final analysis we get this working or not . . . Thank you! (sorry, I don’t have AOL messenger or any IM). Richard at artondisk.com

Cal, oh, nothing sounds stupid when it comes to this stuff. Tiny mce or whatever that wysiwyg feature is called, adds all kinds of strange html to our posts, making it especially difficult to add photos and keep them centered and in position (it adds a lot of extra p and /p tags for no good reason). I was hoping that would be fixed in the latest iteration of WordPress but since I never complained about it I guess I’m the only one with the issue.
We are using a theme called Jakarta, but we have modified it a great deal. This issue might just be with our site and not with other themes.
I tried your suggestion but when I go into the html there isn’t a space there, and any spaces I did find, such as before the word “target” I took out. It didn’t make a difference.
So here’s a random thought– there’s a website at http://www.sitepoint.com/article/beware-opening-links-new-window where the author recommends never opening things in new windows in the first place as it annoys visitors. I hadn’t thought about that. We don’t like using our “back” button any more than we have to but maybe the answer is for us to quit having things open in new windows.

Personally I like having links open in new windows because I don’t want to lose what I was looking at in the first place, and often when I try to get back to where I was something stops me or resets the back button anyway.

I’ll think about this some more. In the meantime where we really do want the thumbnail to work, we will let the link open in the main window. Thank you for trying so hard to make this work.

Richard