snielsen

An update to the plugin has fixed this issue.

Just squashed the IE bug and pushed the fix in a new version (0.9.3.4).

No worries 🙂 Any bug reports or constructive criticism is welcome. I just want to make ultralink products the best they can be. Thanks for your vote of confidence in the project 🙂 With ultralinks, the primary goal is to enhance the web surfing experience and bring the information users want even closer to them without being annoying/disrespectful. At the same time, if ultralinks can assist publishers in website monetization then it is an even better win-win.

(Regarding Amazon Affiliate Links)
By default, the WordPress plugin (and other products like the browser extensions) pull their ultralink data from a central database at ultralink.me (brief overview here: https://ultralink.me/w/umdatabase.html). This database is continually growing through both user feedback and smart backend algorithms. There are amazon affiliate links in the central database but they are currently added manually (as appropriate) and so their coverage is not that good (the ‘video games’ vertical has been worked on a lot and so that has good amazon link coverage). When an ultralink that has an amazon link comes back from the central database it is re-written with your affiliate key (if set in the WordPress plugin settings pane) so that you get the commission.

Because we are still small (we haven’t even launched beta officially yet) we have the classic chicken and egg problem with the central database. That is that it will only get bigger and more fleshed out as people contribute to it and people will only contribute to it once it is already large and fleshed out.

So if you see an ultralink that could have an amazon affiliate link on it you can submit it back to the central database for review (by clicking on the ultralink.me button of an ultralink and then clicking ‘edit’ on the relevant data) and we will jump on it pretty quickly. Once it is accepted into the central database it is leveraged across all users and so any contributions you make help everybody else.

We have another product which lets you host your own database of ultralinks on our servers (outlined here https://ultralink.me/w/hosted.html). In the WordPress plugin settings pane in the “ultralink.me Database” field you can put the name of your own hosted database in there. This lets you have complete editorial control over the ultralinks on your website and any changes or additions you make go live immediately. And if you want to leverage all the work of the central database but just override or supplement it with your own ultralinks you can do that too.

(Regarding Trigger Behaviors)
We are constantly experimenting and trying to find the right balance of user respect, ease of use and discoverability. Currently the policy we have is that once an ultralink is triggered and the popup is shown, if you hover off of the popup it goes away. However, when an inline content view comes up (like Wikipedia for example) then to dismiss both the inline content view and the popup, you need to click off it. When the ultralink’s linkset is sufficiently bare such that the user is probably going to click on the Wikipedia link anyway we bring it up for them automatically, causing the behavior to immediately require clicks for dismissal. The original behavior was to dismiss when people hovered out of the inline content view but we found that people would accidentally hover out of the inline content view and then they would be outside of the popup and it would dismiss that as well which they found annoying.

Sorry for being so longwinded! In short, I appreciate your feedback and I want to make the product even better. We are in beta and still shaping our ideas of what we want the project to be so we invite suggestions/ideas. Let me know about your experiences running ultralinks on your site. Thanks!