Simply Jonathan

Archive for September 2010

Today's Wulff Morgenthaler 

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All great things can be used for stupid purposes.

Announcing wp-default-links

It’s a time for WordPress plugins for me it seems. After making the one for currencies.dk I have another one ready, one I call wp-default-links.

This next one is one that isn’t of much use unless one uses Michel Fortin’s PHP-Markdown (although I guess you could use it without), but one that I find helpful if one does.

In Markdown, one has the ability to offload the URI part of a link to later time. To do so, one makes a placeholder ID on the link one wants: [Link][placeholder-id]. Later on in the document, one then gets to define said link’s URI with the following: [placeholder-id]: http://example.com/.

I find, however, that I often link to the same resources and in the same way, making this a little tedious. So I came up with the idea to make a central database table of these, to allow common ones to be reused.

It intentionally is very unobtrusive, setting its priority in WordPress to a level that will virtually guarantee it be activated as the last plugin, so as to not risk going off before Markdown has had a chance to substitute the links. Markdown has, as it should, first movers advantage in this field, and wp-default-links will kick in if it finds any leftovers. (Thus it will also work backwardscompatibily.)

The plugin can be downloaded at Github.

This is Simply Jonathan, a blog written by Jonathan Holst. It's mostly about technical topics (and mainly the Web at that), but an occasional post on clothing, sports, and general personal life topics can be found.

Jonathan Holst is a programmer, language enthusiast, sports fan, and appreciator of good design, living in Copenhagen, Denmark, Europe. He is also someone pretentious enough to call himself the 'author' of a blog. And talk about himself in the third person.