Why do I care you ask?

Well, if you take the 3 minutes necessary to register to comment on this blog, you will be able to not only leave a great comment, but you will also be able to link your social profiles on major social networks to your comment.  So lets say you want your fellow commentors to see where you are on Digg, Sphinn, or other major social network.  If you spend an extra 10 seconds scrolling to the bottom of your profile page, you will be able to enter your username on your networks.  Then next to your comments you will find a link to your profile on that network.

What if your favorite social network is not an option?

The beauty of this plugin is that it allows the blog owner to make simple code modifications (just adding an extra array value really) and have new networks show up. Obviously your new social network needs to have a simple, consistent method for linking to your profile.  For most networks this is the case.

Isn’t this a waste of time?

I guess you might think that.  But take a look at the HTML behind the link then re-answer that question to yourself.

I was not interested in changing the URL in the off-chance that it actually had generated a link. I actually have a redirection plug-in installed on this blog so that I can handle affiliate offers when I do include them in a post. And while it may have been an obvious solution to most readers, it did not click for me until that point… use the redirection script to handle redirecting the misspelled URL to the new, correctly spelled URL and post.

It is a simple plug-in to use. You bring up the redirection screen from “Manage” -> “Redirection” (obviously once the plug-in is installed. Type in the mis-spelled url (/2008/05/06/my-marketleveral-publisher-signup/), then type in the location to redirect to (http://www.esoomllub.com/2008/05/06/my-marketleverage-publisher-signup/), save it, and all works great.

Another really cool benefit of this plug-in is that you can actually keep track of the number of clicks each redirect gets. Awesome.

Interesting fact… in the short time since I put this redirect in place, maybe 15 minutes, there have already been 3 hits on the old URL that were redirected to the new URL.

PS RTFM

It seems that if I had taken the time to really dig in to this plug-in I would have noticed that there is an option in the plug-in to auto-add a 301 for posts that have the slug change. So, my instructions above are not to click this option on, and not even worry about changed URL’s in the future.