aLinks 2.0 Bug Fixes

I had been happily using the “aLinks” WordPress plugin by Sean Hickey for quite a while. The plugin automatically generates links for keywords that you specify. Version 1 did everything that I wanted, but it broke when I upgraded to WordPress 2.6. I found that Sean had written a completely new aLinks 2.0, so I installed it and found that it mostly worked, though with some minor problems.

Then Sean seemed to vanish from the face of the Internet. His web server went off line, making it impossible to even send him an email, and has been that way for several months.

So I had no choice but to go into the source code and fix the bugs that were bothering me. Since the code is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) I am making the revised plugin available to anyone who is interested.

New WordPress 3.x compatible version.

Old WordPress 2.x compatible version.

Bugs Fixed

  1. aLinks failed to respect word boundaries when identifying keyphrases, causing links to be inserted in the middle of words.
  2. aLinks was ignoring the “classes” setting which allows you to assign one or more CSS classes to the links.

UPDATE 10/31/2012: Fixed a problem with WordPress 3.4.2 and added an option to enable/disable aLinks’s internal caching.

Warning

If you are upgrading from aLinks 1.x you must first export your keyphrases to a file, then import them back in after you have installed version 2.0. Otherwise you will lose your keyphrases.

Other Notes

To install, unzip and copy the entire alinks directory to your wp-content/plugins directory.

The documentation is included as a PDF file in the alinks/includes directory.

WordPress 2.1

I’ve crossed my fingers and switched everything on the site to WordPress 2.1. If you see anything that is obviously broken, let me know via the contact form.

UPDATE: Two minor problems seen so far:

  1. My old “Press It” bookmarks stopped working. Solved by creating new ones.
  2. There seems to be a new formatting bug that inserts unnecessary and unterminated <p> tags in certain <div>s. This produces some ugliness that I worked around by tweaking the CSS.

UPDATE: Another problem: comments in templates don’t always seem to work. Note to self: delete it; don’t comment it out.

How to delete all cookies in Firefox on closing, EXCEPT for those from selected domains

Under Options|Privacy|Cookies select “Allow sites to set cookies” and “until I close Firefox”. Then press the Exceptions button and add the sites that you want to allow to set permanent cookies, with the “Allow” option. Obvious once it’s pointed out, but I guess like a lot of people I assumed that “Exceptions” could only be used to block cookies.

From Mungo.

Converting PowerPoint to HTML

For various reasons I have to use Microsoft PowerPoint to prepare presentations, but if I post the slides on-line I want them in HTML format so that they can be viewed without using PowerPoint.

PowerPoint has an “Export to HTML” feature that produces nice-looking slides that can only be viewed with Internet Explorer. Or at least they look terrible in Firefox.

The solution is to load the PowerPoint presentation into OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice has an export to HTML feature that works fine with Firefox and other modern browsers.