External link

plugin weirdness.

I had been using the “Identify External Links” since the redesign of the site, it adds that little icon next to the links and and opens them in a new browser tab.

But I could never get it to work correctly, especially with links to the BBC news section, it seemed to have trouble identifying them as external though only on this host, it manages OK on another site on another host server. Here it struggles with URIs that are news.bbc.co.uk and the changes I made meant all links were identified so cites from the Quoter plugin opened a new page, instead of just jumping up to the quoted comment 😕

All kinds of fiddling made no difference, so I changed it today to the Semilogic one. Which of course required more fiddling with the code.

Didn’t want the stylesheet called into the head, easy enough to delete all those lines but it gave you the option of just having the external links in the main body of the post identified or all the links on the page, well I wanted more than the former and less than the latter.

I didn’t want the links in the sidebar done but did want those in comments identified, luckily I could swipe a bit of code from the original plugin to add so it just works in the main post body and comments. Just change the target=_blank to a jscript onlick and the class name and it seems to work better, figures out the BBC links but then I remembered linked images and of course it buggers them up, especially the ones with the nice border floated right.

So more hacking about to buffer out any images that are linked, using the code that’s already in the plugin and now it looks like it works, there’s bound to be something wrong somewhere though , no doubt when WordPress upgrades to v2.5 😕

One of these days I’ll have to learn all this malarkey 😀

3 Replies to “External link”

  1. Hi yer Tox
    I’m not entirely qualified to answer or help your quest, and there are probably readers out there that would know a lot better about this than me, but have you come across Joomla!
    Joomla is a free cms with which you can easily make your own blogs etc – the beauty of it being that you apply pieces and parts of your site from the back end applying code to just that article or menu or whatever – it would seem to me that this might be your way forward and to get total control…
    there are hundreds of plug-ins for all sorts of jobs, and furthermore, you can go onto the Joomla Forum for help at any time – where you are bound to find the answer…!
    that’s my 10 penneth for the week
    Lou

  2. ‘Oisted by me own petard – is that wee I smell? 😉

    Thanks for the info Lou but a full on CMS kit is a bit of overkill for here and I know I whinge about it but after all the years I’ve kind of got my head round WordPress.

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