Yahoo Shortcuts Wordpress Plugin

Alex King and his team over at Crowd Favorites has been working with the Yahoo and the Yahoo Shortcuts team to create an awesome Wordpress Plugin. For those who don’t know, Alex King is an awesome plugin developer and has been working with the Wordpress team since its inception.

Yahoo Shortcuts basically looks for key terms and provides shortcuts to content that might be relevant. Examples would be maps, stock tickers, and photos. By using the Shortcuts API, Alex was able to filter the content of a post through these shortcuts to allow the author to include some of this rich content in their post.

I’m using it on this post and it picked up Yahoo Shortcuts and Wordpress and linked them to their respective sites. If I reference that Alex is located in Denver, CO, it will pick that location up and provide a map. It also found a few images of Denver from Flickr, one of which I included in this post. All the images it pulls from Flickr are creative commons and the attribute is added as needed to the photos.

The plugin is beta and has a few quirks. First, I couldn’t use it in Safari (this post was done in Firefox). I’m sure this has more to do with the version of TinyMCE included in Wordpress and it’s poor support for Safari. Second, when I went to review the post in the shortcuts editor screen, I saw a few foreach errors related to flickr (I think it was the comma in Denver, CO). And overall, it’s slow.
Despite these issues, if you are looking for ways to spruce up your blog posts, I recommend this plugin. It’s only going to get better. And congrats to Alex and his team on working on such a great project.

You can download it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yahoo-shortcuts/

Check out Alex’s post about it here: http://alexking.org/blog/2007/12/13/yahoo-shortcuts

Also, Alex and Jeremy Zawodny did a screencast demo of the plugin here: http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?cl=5251111