Posts Tagged Auto

So, you’ve been writing on your Microsoft Word and you have become accustomed to the program automatically converting the URLs you type into clickable links.  You’ve been posting in several forums and you’ve become used to the system creating hyperlinks for the web addresses you share without having to onerously type those [URL] and [/URL] BBcodes.  You’ve been posting ads on popular classifieds on the web, and you have grown confident that the email address you type will immediately be hyperlinked and such can result to an increased response rate.

Why, then, do you have to take a step backwards when it comes to your Wordpress blog?

Why should Wordpress, the industry standard when it comes to blogging platforms, have to make life harder for you by requiring HTML encoding just to create correct hyperlinks for the email addresses URLs you type?

If you’ve been maintaining a Wordpress blog for a significant period of time, you’ll know what we’re talking about.

-          When a URL is succeeded by a period, a parentheses or another character necessary for the correctness of the sentence structure, Wordpress will also add that character to the hyperlink it will generate, hence causing visitors to be taken to an invalid URL.

-          When a term is typed that includes the character “@” in the middle, Wordpress mistakes it for an email address and automatically hyperlinks the same even if it corresponds to an invalid email destination like joey@work or Johnny@play.

-          When a URL is too long, Wordpress still displays it, which often results in distorted pages that makes viewing less convenient and enjoyable.

Indeed, Wordpress’ hyperlinking system is flawed.

This is where plugins come in.

The best plugin that remedies all the shortcomings of Wordpress’ default hyperlinks is Auto Hyperlink URL.  This clever little add-on has become an absolute necessity for Wordpress bloggers.

Aside from correcting all the problems of Wordpress’ default hyperlinking system which we have enumerated above, the Auto Hyperlink URL allows blog operators to:

-          Truncate URLs after they reach a certain number of characters;

-          Include words that will precede and succeed truncated URLs;

-          Allow text URLs to show only the hostname;

-          Open a new window when a URL is clicked so that visitors won’t have to leave the blog page;

-          Make the blog page “nofollow” to prevent the proliferation of spam on the comments section;

-          Read class B domain references (links that are not preceded by “www”).

Installing the Auto Hyperlink URL Wordpress plugin is just as easy as installing other plugins.  Simply download the Auto Hyperlink URL plugin and upload the same to your wp-content/plugins folder.  Thereafter, install the Auto Hyperlink URL from your Wordpress Plugin menu in the admin panel.

In this day and age when linking has taken central stage in the race for top search engine positions and when read rate is determined by interlinking blog posts within the same blog, the Auto Hyperlink URL Wordpress plugin has become a mandatory addition to any Wordpress blog.