A Blogger’s best friend - Insights plugin for WordPress
Recently I had the pleasure of using Vladimir’s WordPress service for some help with my Google Reader Shared Items plugin.
Vlad impressed me with his knowledge of WordPress so I started trying out a few of his Wordpress Plugins, one of which has really started saving me time, so much so I thought I’d give it a quick review.
The Insights Wordpress Plugin
The Insights plugin allows you to easily embed -
- Links from your own blog, Google Search or Wikipedia
- Videos from YouTube
- Images from Flickr
- Maps from Google Maps
All without leaving the write post page in WordPress! This significantly reduces the time in which you can create a very professional, media rich post, I’m finding it to be a huge timesaver.
Here’s how it works -
The Interface
Once installed, Insights appears in it’s own section just below the post window on the write post page. The interface couldn’t be simpler - a search box with radio buttons to choose which source you’d like to use to access all the content.
The results display right there below the search window so you don’t have to leave the post page. Here’s what it looks like -
Link Search
A quick search easily finds other pages on your blog you might want to link to which is much faster than opening a new window to search your blog or opening another instance of WP admin to find a post. The options for Wikipedia and Google Search also work in the same manner.
Image Search
Need an image or two for your post? Insights makes it very, very easy. You can quickly search Flickr for images (free or commercial), pick different sizes from the drop down menu and embed them into your post with just a couple clicks.
Video Search
How about a YouTube video? Also painless, just search and click on the video of your choice. You can even review the video right there -
Video Review
By clicking on a video from the search results you get this nice display that allows you to not only play the video but read the description and checkout the related stats.
Google Maps
It is also straight forward to find and add a Google Map to a blog post. Search for the location, add markers, set the zoom level and click to embed the map into your post.
Options
From the options panel you can set the number of search results, change how Flickr images are searched and enable the Google Maps module.
What’s Missing?
Not much, but I would really like to see Google Blog Search added. This would make it very quick to find and link to other sources and create trackbacks when posting. That one addition would make this plugin invaluable to me.
How about you? Are you using Insights? Let me know if you try it out.
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