Crowd Favorite has had the opportunity to work with Answers.com this fall on AnswerLinks, a new WordPress plugin. Answerlinks talks to an API at Answers.com and auto-suggests links to definitions and more on Answers.com for terms in your blog post. Then you can choose to add the links you want; very simple and easy.
After going through several design revisions, we created an interface primarily using client side JavaScript to allow you to choose the links you want to add to your post. There are two ways to do this, you can step through the terms one by one using “Link” and “Don’t Link” buttons (similar to the way a spell checker works), or you can simply use the list of links on the side and check the boxes for the terms you want to link.
This was started as a WordPress.com project (and has been rolled out on WordPress.com), but is also available as a downloadable plugin1 for self-hosted/WordPress.org users.
I’m very pleased that Crowd Favorite was able to be involved with this project. It’s wonderful to see Answers.com providing an API into their data to enable this sort of feature, and it’s great that the WordPress community can benefit from it. My thanks to the teams at Answers.com and Automattic, both were great to work with.
UPDATE: There was a typo in the original packaging for this. If you are using version 1.0a, upgrade to 1.0b or rename the “answerlinks” folder to “answerlink”. This only affects version 1.0a.
- It is available on my WordPress Plugins page and also from wordpress.org. [back]
Popularity: 7% [?]
marketin in Russian adds this Comment:
It’s wonderful to see, than WordPress community can benefit from it. And Thanks for your works
October 12th, 2007 at 1:37 am
(a different) Alex adds this Comment:
That’s an awesome looking interface, if only all of the wp admin pages looked that good! good work
October 12th, 2007 at 2:38 am
Niklas adds this Comment:
Thanks – but I must say this only works with the rich text editor, which is a tad sad. Otherwise, this is a brilliant idea.
October 12th, 2007 at 5:15 am
greggles adds this Comment:
When I read about this coming I wondered who had done it, so congratulations! It looks quite good.
I do wonder about answer.com’s motivation in this. This seems like it will have a few effects for them
1. Tons more links – where people used to link out to wikipedia as a definitive resource they are much more likely now to choose answers.com
2. Given number 1, answers.com will get a lot more traffic from the readers of these posts and they will also get lots more “linkjuice”. I imagine that answers.com wouldn’t be as interested in this project if it automatically added the rel=”nofllow” attribute.
3. Endear (or endanger) them and their relationship with blog writers. This all depends on whether or not these easy links are helpful to your typical writer/reader.
Looking at your site it seems you’ve only linked out to answers.com twice since 2002 (definition of raid, definition of diff). Now we get UI clutter on every page edit for something that’s barely used?
My concern is that this was motivated by 1 and 2 and not at all by 3 – helping users.
October 12th, 2007 at 5:31 am
Alex adds this Comment:
Niklas– actually, it works just fine with the Quicktags as well. If you have the rich text editor option disabled there is an “AnswerLinks” button to launch this feature.
Greg– I can’t speak to their motivations, I’d imagine that it’s a combination of all of the above – like most things that are :scare: free :/scare: .
October 12th, 2007 at 6:42 am
Aaron adds this Comment:
Greg — If the API service itself is useful, I don’t think it will take long for people to modify it to link to other websites or to add nofollow links. The code is GPL, so it is open to modifications.
October 12th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
That’s exactly on point. To my knowledge, these other services don’t offer the kind of link suggestion API that Answers.com has enabled for this plugin.
October 12th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
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[...] adopted the AnswersLink plugin written by Alex King’s “Crowd Favorite” company. The plugin automates the [...]
October 13th, 2007 at 3:18 pm