Blair Williams

Everything is an Experiment

Feature

Randomized Keyword Replacements and Bookmarklet Updates

Randomized Keyword Replacements and Bookmarklet Updates

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I just pushed another release today that I think clears up many issues that users were having plus I got 2 major improvements in.

  1. The first is with the keyword replacement algorithm in Pretty Link Pro. When keyword replacements were turned on and a threshold was set of say, 3 keyword replacements per page, my algorithm was just replacing the first 3 keywords it saw. In this release I altered the algorithm so instead of replacing the first 3, it will now replace them in a more distributed randomized order. This feature request was from one of my users that noted some other apps that were doing this. I dove into the code and luckily my existing algorithm was such that it only took me about an hour to modify.
  2. So, remember how I released the Pretty Link Bookmarklet yesterday? Well, I was immediately flooded for 2 additional features to be added to it. The first was that the title of the URL should be used as the name of the Pretty Link and the second was that people wanted a way to post this link to some of the social networks. In the 1.4.12 release today these features are available.

Here are some screenshots of these features:

Some users have been happy but some others have been a bit bothered that I'm pushing so many updates lately, well don't worry too much … I'm just ramping up for the Official Launch of Pretty Link Pro on September 1. So get ready for some awesome new features to get rolled out next week — I'm working on some really cool stuff for the free & pro users alike!

Create Short URLs on the fly with the Pretty Link Bookmarklet

Create Short URLs on the fly with the Pretty Link Bookmarklet

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bookmarkletThe Pretty Link Bookmarklet is finally available! My #1 request from users for a while has been to make it easy to create Pretty Links outside of the WordPress admin — and now you can.

If you aren't familiar with what a bookmarklet is, it's basically a button that you can add to your browser's toolbar that will do some action–in this case it's creating Pretty Links. Bookmarklets are great because they are very simple, javascript based buttons that work in practically every browser.

The Pretty Link Bookmarklet is available starting in Pretty Link version 1.4.11. Here's how you'll go about installing it in your browser once you have version 1.4.11 or greater installed in WordPress:

  1. When inside your WordPress admin, click the menu item: “Pretty Link” -> “Tools”
  2. You'll see a link named “Get PrettyLink” under the Bookmarklet section … you'll want to drag that link to your Browser's bookmark bar

That's all you have to do to install it. Now let's look at how you'd use the Pretty Link bookmarklet:

  1. When you're browsing the web and you find a page that you'd like to create a Pretty Link for, just click “Get PrettyLink” in your toolbar while on that page.
  2. Pretty Link will automatically create the link for you and redirect you to a page where you can copy your newly created Pretty Link.

Here are a few screenshots of the bookmarklet in action (in Safari — but the same steps go for FireFox, IE, etc):

I'm currently working on some other ways to easily create Pretty Links soon — so it's only going to get easier to manage your entire link portfolio from Pretty Link!