Tag: Plugins

Amber is a plugin available for WordPress and Drupal that attempts to address the problem of linkrot.

Amber is an open source tool for websites to provide their visitors persistent routes to information. It automatically preserves a snapshot of every page linked to on a website, giving visitors a fallback option if links become inaccessible.

If one of the pages linked to on this website were to ever go down, Amber can provide visitors with access to an alternate version. This safeguards the promise of the URL: that information placed online can remain there, even amidst network or endpoint disruptions.

So, I installed it on a couple of blogs I run and gave it a whirl.

For this blog, it worked like a charm. It scanned all ~10,000 entries/pages and found roughly the same amount of links that needed to be preserved.

I appreciated the ability to store the links on my own server rather than relying on some other server, even something as robust as the Internet Archive.  Be warned, though, if you have a lot of links to preserve, this can take up a lot of server space. In my case, each copied link took an average of 1mb, so I had to set aside 100gb+ of server space. The main drive on my server is 2TB, so that’s not a big deal for me, but it could be a problem for people with less storage.

Of course, the plugin also does give users the ability to store their preserved links on the Internet Archive and a few other cloud-based options if your local storage isn’t adequate or desirable for one reason or another.

I tried it on another blog, however, which has tens of thousands of entries, and could never get the plugin to successfully scan all entries. In future versions, Amber should really support some sort of staggered scanning to deal with sites that have significant numbers of posts and pages.

Other than that, the Amber plugin is awesome. I’m glad to see something like this so easy to deploy and use.

Title Capitalization for WordPress is a plugin that will automatically apply sentence capitalization to post titles and heading elements in WordPress.

Just type in the headline or subhead however you like, and when you save, update or publish a post, the plugin will fix the capitalization automatically.

Slash Edit is an extremely helpful plugin for WordPress that makes it easy to quickly edit a post or page if, like me, you hate WordPress’ admin bar.

To edit any page or post, you simply append /edit to the URL. So, for example, if I wanted to edit this post, I’d just have to go to:

https://brian.carnell.com/articles/2014/slash-edit-plugin-for-wordpress/edit

. . . and I’d immediately be taken to the edit post page for this article. If I wasn’t already logged in to the site, I’d be prompted to log in and then be redirected to the edit screen for this post.

 

Page-list is an awesome plugin for WordPress that makes it easy to embed hierarchical lists of pages within a page.

Suppose, for example, you have a page called Countries and then below that pages like United States, Canada, etc. Rather than having to update the Countries page with links to the subpages, Page-list will let you embed that list automatically.

The short code [subpages] will list all pages in the hierarchy beneath the current page. You can also specify variables to expand or limit the depth of the hierachy displayed. For example, [subpages depth="1"] will only show a list of pages directly between the current page, while [subpages depth="4"] will show all pages up to four levels deep underneath the current page.

This makes it much easier to use and manage pages within WordPress.