Experimental Wordpress plugins deactivated September 23, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, wordpress , trackbackI just deactivated two experimental WordPress plugins.
- Jiglu autotag widget
- Amazon Links Pro
A brave attempt to add “intelligent” tags based on some kind of text analysis of blog content.
The tags map made a change from the usual tag cloud, and the overlay display is manageable, but the results for ‘people’ and ‘dates’ were irrelevant and the same 5 posts kept popping up for nearly all tag searches in the overlay window. To be fair, Jiglu is a very new application and probably worth another chance when it’s more mature.
Less profligate than Jiglu, the Amazon links were hit and miss, based on people’s names and phrases. No sales, but the the plugin only works with amazon.com and not amazon.co.uk.
With both of these I soon felt uncomfortable with the idea of automating the insertion of hypertext links into an article, which is after all, a piece hand crafted author written text even if it’s only a blog post. I think it clashes with the perception of the author’s voice coming through the text when the deliberate insertion of a link can happen alongside some others which are machine generated and therefore differently motivated.
This means I also have to consider very carefully the use of SH-Autolink which is a simple time saving search and replace type of hyperlink generating plugin. For that one, I need to tweak the php code so that only the first instance is hyperlinked in each post containing that string. That will be better than having to avoid using my source phrase more than once, which kind of undermines the whole point of being able to just write and let something else take care of the commonly linked phrases.
I’m now going to try and avoid temptation to test any more experimental Wordpress plugins until at least after the upgrade to version 2.3 has settled down, with all the backward compatibility problems threatened by that procedure.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
May I suggest aLinks for your automatic linking needs? - It really beats the hell out of SH-Autolink, or KB Linker. It has Amazon UK support, but doesn’t play any artificial intelligence tricks, instead only providing linkage to the keywords you specify.
The system is really quite flexible, and compatible with WordPress 2.3. I’ve just installed myself, after coming here via google search looking for auto-linking options.
aLinks also features clickthrough stats which I myself have no use for, but its certainly a selling point for some. I find the best part of a feature is often it’s off-switch, and aLinks has plenty of those too.
I’m quite impressed and hence motivated to share my findings - I’m not in any way affiliated with the author.
Good luck in making your choice.