I’ve decided I might as well copy all the articles I wrote over at everything2.com to this blog.
There’s just one small issue I need to contend with, and that’s how I’m going to handle e2’s linking system.
When you write something at e2, there’s a neat-o way of including links to other pages on e2. You just enclose the text in square brackets and away the engine goes, and looks for the e2 page you are linking to. You can also use the pipe symbol to link to one thing, but display different text on the screen. Essentially it’s like how a hyperlink works using the href attribute. Unfortunately, I can’t just include those links as they are, or at least not if I just copy the original source. And then the formatted links, once the e2 engine has processed them, are relative, which wouldn’t take any work to replace I suppose, but I’m not sure whether a) I am allowed to copy the formatted output, even though I own the source, or b) whether these links work if you are coming from an external page.
But in any case, I figure it will be more fun to use this as an excuse to develop a wordpress plugin. What I’d like to do is allow myself to really easily include hyperlinks. I get bored typing
<a href=”this that and the other”>Some text here<\a>every time, especially when you need to go look up the url and paste it into the text.
No, much easier would be to type something like
[[link text here]]and have it converted automagically to a link to, for example, a wikipedia page. And funnily enough, there’s already a very simple plugin that can do it for you. However, I feel like expanding on it. How about being able to use the same format for a wide variety of links. So I could type
[[wiki|link to wiki page]]or
[[amazon|link text here]]
What’s more, I wouldn’t want to limit the user to my pre-defined set of links. Using an options page from the admin panel, I could allow users to define their own. So, you simply have to say what the text is to identify where the link will go, and what the format of the link will be. If it’s something like an amazon link which you might want to include affiliate codes in, then I hope it would be possible to include those…
Perhaps this is more work than I imagined, but as a starter, here’s an example of a piece. Not sure how those external link markers look when there are so many, but I can work on that:
2 Comments on Adding content from e2
I have had this same problem, but in the end I had few enough articles that I manually changed them all to links to e2. Of course, lots of them were intentionally dead links which doesn’t damage the e2 experience, but does damage the normal web browsing experience. So, sign me up when you write this plugin. I have less skill than you with php, but it doesn’t sound that bad.
If you want to make it really advanced, change the colour if the wiki page/e2 page the link goes to is yet to be written. That would fix it.
I like the colour change, or at least some way of signifying that a link won’t really go anywhere in particular. I hope that wouldn’t put people off too much, because I really like the idea of a broken link as a gentle nudge and a hint that a page could be created in that space.
I suppose I could just have them as e2 links, because after all that’s what they are at the moment, but I think it works quite well linking to wikipedia as well (albeit a tad disloyal). Ideally it would be great to hover over something and be able to choose where to go for more information.
And in that situation, it wouldn’t need to be a link, but something like the Alt+Click used by answers (formerly gurunet). Which would be quite cool. Sounds like a firefox extension waiting to be written…