In addition to link bundling services (Many.at, Brief.ly, Links2.Me), Name.ly also offers a plugin that will automate link bundling on all WordPress sites.

The plugin simply does the following:

1. It scans every post and / or page and finds all embedded references.

2. Then it groups those links into bundles ready to be opened with a single click.

3. Finally, at post’s bottom, it inserts bundles, by clicking on which the site administrators and visitors can check out all links in much timely manner.

Links2Tabs in action

One would want to ask: “why do I need it?”

To start with, as a site admin you might wish to check whether all inserted links work properly. Either during the publishing or later on, while browsing your site and checking up things. With time, many references can change and will not appear as they initially used to be. Links2Tabs will help you automate this manual process.

All the sites readers that are curious to see all the references will now have a handy tool to do so in a matter of seconds. One can argue that there is still a need to click on the tabs to activate them, “what’s the point then?”

The benefit is that once all the sites are preloaded – the browsing process becomes more comfortable. One will not need to click N times in the first place. Only when switching between the tabs. Please note: jumping between the tabs requires only minor left-and-right movements, without much strain in the muscles. Should one wish to fish all the links out of the text, that would involve a lot of up-and-down, and rotational movements of the mouse.

With Links2Tabs we will not need to strain the eyes and wonder which links went missing and were not clicked yet. The plugin will find it all for you.

For instance links taken from a companion plugin Feed2Tabs home page are grouped into one bundled: 1 – 5. When clicked on, it will open all five references in tabs.

The advantages come not only during link opening but also while closing pages. In fact, the plugin places all the sites into the sub-tabs, so that even if there are 20 or 30 of them, all of them can be closed with one single click too. In the table of contents one can also press the last icon and cause the references to open in the browser’s tabs or windows (the latter is the case with the browsers that do not support tabs; e.g., on iPad), – however, one will need to close each opened window separately.

The plugin works right after activation. For those interested in tweaking, it offers two dozens of options. For instance, it is possible to set that the bundles are created and display for the site admins only. It is possible to filter our links referring to the internal resources, links with images, archive files, etcetera.

To trace the links better, the administrator can set the tagging on, so that each link is highlighted with the index numbers [1] … [7]:

Post with tagged references

Open PHP code of the parse allows people to port the plugin into other CMS platforms.

Installation takes just few seconds, either by downloading from wordpress.org (.zip) or directly from the WordPress admin panel by searching for “Links2Tabs”.

Short link: Copy - http://name.ly/~0I9B$E4

Tags: browser, html parser, linking, links, plugins, site menu, site navigation, tabs, Wordpress

Posted on Friday, July 15th, 2011 at 12:15 pm.
Filed under: Announcements.