bugfox blog

I have updated my original aLinks post with a version that works with WP 3.0.

I got a request for Sean Hickey’s original aLinks code.

Here it is

Download

…but be warned that it has some serious bugs. However it includes features that are not in my fixed version.

Go here for my fixed version, which omits some broken features that I never got around to fixing (because I don’t use them.)

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.

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 Performance: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours by Elliott Back

Good ideas, though more for sites that get a lot more traffic than this one.

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.

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.

engrowe.com » Blog Archive » Visual.SpellCheck page hack makes Visual.SpellCheck work with WordPress pages.

Update: after experimenting with this I decided to remove it for the moment. It has a nasty tendency to remove attributes from carefully hand-crafted HTML. Maybe at some point I’ll have time to fix it myself.

A handy list of windows startup applications that may be shown by MSCONFIG (from Sysinfo.org).

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.

The Dojo Foundation