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Yahoo! Shortcuts plugin for WordPress has just been released, provided even the newest blogger with the ability to create high powered posts. It provides an easy way to add maps, financial inserts, and Flickr images to jazz up content.

The Yahoo! Shortcuts plugin Beta has been released, and I wasted no time in activating it in this WordPress blog. I quickly opened up a recent post to edit it and see what this plugin could do. I had posted an article about fantasy football which, although I thought it was great, of course, was kinda bland. In the editing dashboard, the Yahoo! shortcuts plugin widget appeared in the upper right corner, and analyzed the post. The result was three shortcuts, that when reviewed seem unobtrusive enough. There were several highlighted terms that produced small pop-ups when rolled over. The pop-ups only suggested searches via the yahoo! search engine.

I was most excited about the suggested photos for insertion from Flickr. There were some non-relevant pictures - some actually “r” rated. But I did find a great photo of Tom Brady, who was mentioned in my post. One click and the photo was inserted at the beginning of the text.

That being said, after experimenting with the Yahoo! Shortcuts in other posts, I decided to deactivate the plugin. I had noticed that when I went to the category pages, the Yahoo! code was visible. Yucky! Now this is either a bug, or easily remediated by someone more experienced than me. As a result, I can’t honestly decide whether this should affect my rating of the plugin, except that it might create challenges for newbies like me. Anyone with a quick solution?

I wonder about future applications of the plugin. For instance, will there be a way of using it to monetize a blog? That would seem to give Yahoo an incredible advantage in this area, as, with modification, it would create a way to monetize more subtlety as well as providing different ways to monetize from one source.

Anyway, congrats go out to the developer with high interest on what mods will occur in the future. Check out the developer’s page here: the developer’s page.

Also, a shout out to digital-musings.com for a great post breaking down the plugin. I would note that the article mentions how some problems bloggers who use Yahoo! webhosting might experience as the web host supports an earlier version of WordPress. However, as I use yahoo! webhosting and was able to figure out away to upgrade my blog to the latest version of WordPress, more experience bloggers will overcome this limitation with ease as well.