Internal Linking Between Posts in WordPress 3.1

WordPress 3.1 RC2 was released yesterday, which means the final release is just on the horizon. One of the major user interface upgrades is the internal linking feature, something I’ve been trying to find a plugin or other solution for over a year and a half. I briefly tried out RB internal links plugin, but that was just overly clunky and didn’t save me that much time. Naturally I was excited to try it out and upgraded my site to the bleeding edge release.

I was severely disappointed.

I only use the html view within most of my installs. I couldn’t find the new internal linking feature from HTML view, so I enabled the visual mode and found out how the feature works.

When constructing a normal link, you need to highlight the text that will become the anchor, and then click the chain link icon.

But now, you have a drop down option called “Or link to existing content”. You have a search field, where you can type in search term to find the related post, click the selected post and hit the “Add Link” button.

I think that this internal linking feature falls flat in two important ways. First, that you can only see it from one editing view, and second, if you ever go back and change or optimize your post slug or change your site architecture your link will be broken. WordPress inserts the full absolute url path, and not the actual post ID which will resolve itself.

In steps Crowd Favorite

Alex King is a smart guy, and his company Crowd Favorite develops plugins that solve crucial usability issues. Never fancy, their plugins just work and they support them for free – no small task.

Having similar feelings, Crowd Favorite stepped in and made their ‘Internal Link Shortcode‘ plugin which solves both problems.

After install, the plugin will include a simple lookup field in the sidebar. You can move that field wherever you like.

Type in your query and an AJAX call will pop up a list of old posts. Click the post to generate the bracketed post id shortcode. Copy that shortcode into your post and modify to fit the need. I love the idea of having the text attribute that allows you to set what the actual anchor text will be.

Check out the Internal Link Shortcode plugin

Building off what WordPress has added to the core, this is the functionality we’ve all been waiting to see – an easy, user friendly way to link to old blog posts.

What do you think of WordPress attempt for internal linking? Do you think they’ll make changes in a future release to use it with the HTML view as well?

The Internet Explorer Collection

This isn’t the first time someone has compiled all versions of Internet Explorer into an installer. In 2007 Tredosoft packaged those IE browser sets into an executable and made some updates so that conditional comments were rendered and some other necessary developer items.

However, since Windows Vista has been released there has been issue trying to get IE 6 to run correctly, but last I had checked no one had found a solution.

Tonight I came across ‘The Internet Explorer Collection‘. I was wary at first to download it based on the overall look of the website. But I did some poking around online and I couldn’t find anything that screamed scam, so I decided to try it out on one of our less important computers at home.

I tested out the later release version of Internet Explorer 6 and from a cursory evaluation, it appeared as though it rendered everything accurately (issues abounding ).

Have other developers used the IE Collection?

I know that there are other ways to run older versions of Internet Explorer for testing, most developers I know use virtual machines. But using a local executable seems much easier to me. This post is mostly to see what everyone else thinks. Who has used the Internet Explorer Collection? Has it worked correctly for you? Have you seen any shortfalls? Let me know.

#variable#

You just have to surround the variable in those tags. All Coldfusion tags, I read today, start with the “cf”. That coupled with the fact that it is a tag language, with an opening and a closing tag is supposed to make the language easier on designers used to just HTML programming.

Now, can it be easier for designers and a better language than PHP? I know my friend would say no way. And I do know that it is way too early in the game for me to evaluate that with an expertise, if ever. But I read a number of articles today that had good points as why it is better. I will just have to have the time to continue on the path to evaluate that for myself.

You’ve seen this. (Include Image of website with white background) It is the auto complete feature in the Google Toolbar that turns the fields you have filled out and designated with saved information to quickly fill out forms.

This is all the code you need in your rule in your stylesheet;

input{
background:#fff !important;
}

I don’t typically use the “!important” rule, I usually associate it with CSS hacks, but in this case, this is just a nice usability thing that will really help out your designs.

I read that Microsoft is increasing space from 2 Gig to 4 / 5 Gig on all free Hotmail accounts, and 10 Gig on the paid accounts.  I checked my account, nothing had changed as of yet, but it was a new post.  I am sure in the coming month that will be different.

Not that I don’t love Google, but here’s hoping they keep pace. The end users always benefit from competition. Now, Google didn’t budge when Yahoo! increased it space a month or two back to unlimited, so there is no reason to think they will here either. But…it is Microsoft, and I have to believe that they hate Microsoft the most and would view Yahoo! as less of a threat.

Either way, I never thought I could use so much space on my email, but I am finding ways. Part of the problem being I don’t have the feature to remove attachments, but still. Given the opportunity, users will find new ways to use what is given and then demand more.

For awhile I had known about the discovery of multiple Internet Explorers made by Joe Maddalone in 2003, but not until today did I know about this little installer. Now, in theory it’s not that big of a deal, I already had the Internet Explorer version I was testing for, and it worked fine in my workflow. But, those old browsers didn’t understand Microsoft’s conditional comments, which is bread and butter when you are trying to get a website to look the same.

There was a fix that was found for this on “Position is Everything – Taming Your Multiple IE Standalones” website article. This was then wrapped up into the Tredosoft package that makes the developers lives even easier.

All of the versions of the browsers don’t seem to be working on my 64 bit system at work, but that is understandable, I have a lot of issues with that with other software anyway. I just wonder if it works on Vista and / or Windows Media Center edition 2005. I didn’t see a forum at the Tredosoft website, only a long obnoxious series of users comments on the homepage for the installer.

Thanks to Chip to pointing this out to me, he has come a long way from knowing nothing about web design just a short while ago to finding this before I did. Thanks man.

The idea of a lightbox is to put the focus on a viewable element, without leaving a page. Usually this is an image that loads on top of the current page, greying out the website behind it using a transparent .png or a transparency style (two different proprietary styles in IE and Firefox).

Although I love lightbox, and all of the transitions, I really want something that uses the transitions with non image content like html pages. I think this could be very useful, as does most of the online community, for login pages and AJAX driven applications. So I started to hunt, and man are there a ton of different options.

The one that I liked the most, seemed to be easily customizable, and changed things just enough to make sense globally for html and images was Greybox.

I struggled with it for half of a day, but fortunately there is a Google user group to post questions to. I didn’t realize that the directory structure could not be organized site wide, but needed to reside relatively within the directory of the page where it would be used.

I had it working, but then I broke it, and once I figure it out in more depth I will continue this entry.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling, but that did nothing. Then, I found a link that gave me my solution. Right after I installed, I had taken out the default bookmarks to the Mozilla site in the Bookmarks toolbar. I didn’t have any links there at all, so apparently the blank space was what was causing the problem. So, if you close the Bookmarks Toolbar (View > Toolbars > Bookmarks Toolbar) it will stop bounching if you have no linkes. In my case, I just imported my links from the desktop, and that solved the problem also.

However, I found some instructions on how to at least find the audio brand or manufacturer.

Step 1: Type Windows > R

Step 2: In the window that comes up, type “dxdiag”

Step 3: A window prompt will come up asking if you want Windows to check your DirectX diagnostic tool, just hit “OK”.

Step 4: You will see a series of tabs, click on any of the tabs that say “Sound”.

Step 5: Under the information listed for “Device” you will see a fieldset called “Name”, and this is where you will find the audio manufacturer as well as other related information.