Enhance your Blog with Yahoo! Shortcuts

By Mitch “Yahoooo!!!!” Keeler

We are all searching for ways to add more interactivity and tools to our own web sites, and Yahoo! has taken a step to making that a lot easier to do.  With the new Yahoo! Shortcuts, you can enhance your posts with media, links and information from them.

You can embed maps, products, news, search Flickr photos, maps and more.

The way it works is that after you have written your blog post, this plugin for WordPress looks for Flickr photos, products, places and companies.  If the plugin finds content relative to your post it will let you know and show you what it has found.

You also have the option to review each shortcut to see if it is right for you.  For example, if it links to your new Samsung SyncMaster monitor you just reviewed, but you don’t want it to link to Yahoo’s search on it – just remove it.  As far as photos go, here is a little more on how the Flickr embedding goes:

Shortcuts also searches the top terms in your post and provides a quick and easy way to add images from Flickr. You can resize and position the images anywhere on your post, and photos are automatically attributed to their respective authors per the Creative Commons license.

I would highly suggest at least giving this plugin a shot – if you are searching for ways to make your own blog a little more interactive.