LinkToThisPage
Hello-
A while back we started this site about creative real estate investing and were very concerned about how we could get real estate investors to visit the guide. I bounced around the internet looking at various real estate sites and noticed they all had something in common. In addition to great articles about real estate investing, they all had multiple back links, not just to the home page, which was broadly about the topic of real estate investing, but also to deeper pages, covering topics from creative financing, investing techniques and lease options. So, that being said, we decide that if we were going to get people to visit our real estate investing guide, we would have to do something creative.
This is a bit off topic, as we are a Guide for Creative Real Estate Investing that mostly speaks about topics like how to lease purchase homes, however, we were encouraged by a post we saw regarding an SEO Checklist. One of the items in the list was to encourage back-linking. I thought it would make the whole thing a bit easier by creating a Wordpress Plugin. It’s call LinkToThisPage.
The LinkToThisPage WordPress plugin provides a quick, simple to use, and unobtrusive way for users to obtain a link to your post for use on their own web site. The anchor text provided to the user is based upon the title of the post or page. This plug-in can help to get back-links deep into your website, eliminating home-page-only linking.
Give it a try and please let me know what you think. There are currently no configuration options. Just install and use automatically. The next version will contain configuration options.
BE SURE TO CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PLUG-IN, Site Table of Contents
In future versions:
1) Ability to choose whether to display the post/page title or the html title tag.
2) Ability to change width/height of plug-in textarea.
3) Ability to modify text size/color.
4) Modify position of plug-in.
5) Ability to decide whether to show/hide the link by default. – DONE
6) Ability to decide whether of not to show on pages, posts or both – DONE
If you’re interested in another implementation of this plugin, please check out the Link to Me Textbox WordPress Plugin by Jim Westergren. This version does not use the hide/unhide method, however, displays a text box anywhere you choose in your template. As it is less discreet, it may draw more visitors to copy your link. Try them both and use the one that best suits you.
Thank you for visiting my Guide to Creative Real Estate Investing
If you’d like to leave a comment, please contact me via the feedback page.
Link to this page
Thanks for this plugin. I will try it and I think it will bring me some new inbound links… Thanks!
Thank you, Gennice-
I hope you like it. I welcome your feedback.
can you edit how it displays?
Sorry – I tried it but it didn’t work on my site. Great idea though
‘Just installed it. I think I like it.
hi,
nice idea for a plugin.
i tried installing this, which worked, but i can’t find the configuration settings. i’m on wordpress 2.7 … your readme file doesn’t say much about configuration, just to use the “customizing tool” … ???
let me know what should be done, because it’s not showing up in my posts.
cheers
david
http://www.davidsmeaton.com
This is a nice reminder for people – I’ll give it a try!
Thanks
Well, that’s just silly. All you have to do is right click on your mouse and select “copy link address.” You don’t need a plugin and that line at the end of every post is completely annoying, ruining the aesthetic of a good theme.
Thanks a lot for this plug-in. I’ve been searching it. Happy New Year
For those that are having problems with the plugin, please reach out to me. I have only tested it with a limited number of templates, but one thing to note is that it only displays on Single Posts and Pages, not on the home screen. In order to avoid the use of JavaScript, I used style sheets. When you repeat the plugin interface on the front page, it will not work, so I left it out for now.
Thank you for all who find it useful.
Anonymous-
Thank you for your feedback. While you’re correct that someone can copy the URL and link back manually, this plug-in simplifies the process.
The real beauty of the plugin is that it also encourages deep linking with keywords, rather than just linking to the home page.
Excellent plugin, thank you!!
And I agree that offering up the full HTML code to the specific page can’t help but get someone to link that may not want to go through the hassle. Also uses your SEO friendly titles (unless of course they are edited) as opposed to some vague link words.
Did you know that I made such a Wordpress plugin already back in 2006?
http://www.jimwestergren.com/link-to-me-textbox-wordpess-plugin/
But yours are different and you get a link back from every person using it … clever …
Jim-
That’s great. Looks like your plugin is a little different. I Googled “Link to this page wordpress plugin” and every other variation and didn’t find any real plugins… or yours, so I decided to make my own.
As far as the backlinks go, I don’t think Google actually counts those, as the DIV is initially hidden. Also, the keyword “linktothispage” is totally unrelated to my site.
The real motivation of the link was to allow people to find the plugin.
Thanks for the post.
Ok. I will edit my article and link to you as I find that yours are actually better. If you want you could link to me back as well.
i like this plugin but when i activ its riche Editor stops working & i can see only html editor
(i use wpMU v 2.65)
Hi, Yair-
I have not tested the plugin with wpMU. Do you also have problems with other plugins like the “ShareThis” plugin? I used the same method to insert the link that they use.
I was just thinking; since this plugin is in relity a beta, judging by your responses to comments, then would it not have been an idea to label it as a beta, for the sake of clarity?
Sharron-
Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I’m not sure how exactly people go about User Acceptance Testing with free software, as technically, I can only test it on my own systems. At what point is it no longer considered Beta?
[...] simple to use, and unobtrusive way for users to obtain a link to your post for their own …..read more Download Plugin! Version 1.0 Last Updated: January 6, 2009 Author: IntelCapRep Visit [...]
Basing my reply on what I know of most beta-testings: The initial beta release is when you have a safe but slightly buggy product that you’re 99% sure won’t harm anybody’s system, combined with the fact that it works as described otherwise.
At that point you launch as an alpha release to developers/testers, who remove the major bugs they find and report back. (It appears you did that stage all yourself.)
Following that you release it to the public as a beta 1. (That appears to be the statge you are at now.) From feedback you clear up any issues that are noticed and release a beta 2. If satisfactory make minor changes and release as a final “retail” version: perhaps in this case a Version 1.2RTM (- “Release to Manufacturing.”).
That’s how I’d proceed if I were a developer anyway: That’s based upon industry practice generally. I don’t know if there are strict regulations governeing this. If there are I would imagine that they would vary from compamy to company. Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
Thanks Sharron-
I updated the file to indicate a beta.
Я писал что-то подобное, но у Вас тема более глубого раскрыта
Relating to the comment above. The original comment was in Russian, so I will do my best to translate via Babelfish:
Я писал что-то подобное, но у Вас тема более глубого раскрыта
The exact translation is “I wrote something similar, but for you a theme in more depth is exposed.”
My impression is the translation is something like “I wrote something similar, but yours reveals the specific post topic [in the link].”
Sorry if I got it totally wrong.
По моему у Вас украли эту статью и поместили на другом сайте. Я её уже видела.
link is good but the box is diplayed under my sidebar, wayyyy under the link ! :s
Приятно понимать, что остались действительно стоящие блоги в этой мусорке рейтинга Яши. Ваш – один из таких. Спасибо
[...] очень замечательный плагин для Вордпресса тут немного его переделал и он стал от этого еще [...]
Hourge-
Who do you think stole the article? Did someone just link back to me?
xtaz-
Have you tried it on different browsers? Any more specific info you can provide may help me in creating a fix.
Great plugin! A few quick questions:
1. how to have it work on posts on the homepage? right now you have to click on the individual post page to see it.
2. also, how to have the html box be open intitialy, instead of clicking on the link first. I would like to have the copy and paste html already there.
Thanks!
Слушай, аффтар, а ты сам писал или перписывал откуда-то?
J-
Thank you for the feedback.
The reason the plugin is not on the home page is because it’s using CSS and not JavaScript. Every time the code repeats, it repeats the same div values for each post. As the hide/show attributes are contained within the CSS file, when you unhide one link, ALL links on all stories unhide (as they have the same IDs). I’m brainstorming a work-around that doesn’t require me to use JavaScript.
Related to your second question. I can code it to have the box open initially. I will put that in the next release.
Прелестно) Хм… забавненько
Hi Augie.
It’s a really great plugin. I was wondering if there is a way to call it directly on the page via the “if function exists”?
Хорошо написано, надо будет скинуть ссылочку товарищам, чтобы и они оценили вашу статью
You can probably call it with “if function exists.” The only problem I’ve run into is with the naming of the object ID. Because it’s controlled by CSS/DIV rather than javascript, if you open one instance on the page, you open them all. I’d basically have to rewrite it to dynamically assign IDs. I’m not sure if that would work with the CSS. I minimum, I’d have to change the IDs on the hidden/visible attributes.
Даниил-
Thanks for sharing with your friends. I appreciate it.
I like it!
Nice work – really encourages/prompts visitors to link to your blog when they might not even have thought about it!
Many thanks.
I’ve just updated to version 1.1 beta; which has been released today. I’ll look forwards to monitoring the plugin’s performance again, although I had no major issues with 1.0.
I suggest coming out of beta on the next release, maybe going to 2.0. I think another beta release would be one too many.
Although I suggested a beta release suffix in the first place, maybe it’s coming up to time to say “eureka”. When 1.1 has been proved to work without adverse effects I would suggest dropping the beta suffix from then on. Every WordPress plugin is a work in progress – as is WordPress itself.
Thanks for your perseverance BTW. I’m still using it and still liking it.
Works perfect. Thank you so much!
P.S.: The download link above still indicates 1.0, yet leads to 1.1. – ‘Just thought I’d mention it.
It’s now appearing on my home page too, and is working well to all accounts and purposes with my theme that I customised from a no-longer-available free theme.
Sharron-
Thank you for the kind comments. I wish I had more time to spend with some of the updates. I’ll just have to knock them out one at a time.
I liked your plugin. But there is no option to configure,
I need to place the link in another place than the default one, Is ther any template tags for this?
thanks
I’ve installed your plug-in on my site and it works properly but for some reason the text link is being displayed beneath the link icon. Any idea what may be causing this?
Nevermind – I had to make some CSS additions because there was some parent CSS code that was impacting the layout. Looking forward to seeing if this little add-on has any impact on site linkage. Thanks!
I love this plugin but I have a humble request. Is there any way to modify it so it also generates the code needed to embed a comic?
Thanks for the great work!
Venn
Embed a comic? I fail to follow…
mtsandeep-
There is a CSS file in the package. You can modify it by hand if you want to change the appearance.
“Embed a comic? I fail to follow…”
Sorry, I did not explain well. I was wondering if instead of displaying just a link could this be modified to generate the HTML needed for users to copy the actual comic into their blog/journal etc…
An example is located here http://www.explosm.net/comics/1671/
Thanks again for any help with this.
P.S. Is there another plugin for WP that provided this function? I have searched long and hard but came up with naught.