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.

1. It is available on my WordPress Plugins page and also from wordpress.org. [back]