bugfox blog

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.

Download

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.

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.