WebProNews

The company expanded its Yahoo Shortcuts into a dynamic set of tools available as a plug-in for blogs using the WordPress platform.

A clever toolset newly announced by Yahoo offers WordPress bloggers a sidekick bearing additional content from Yahoo's various content services, including the Flickr photo sharing site.

Yahoo Shortcuts have been seen in Yahoo's pages as dashed underlined links. Doing a mouseover of one of these provides a popup with additional content related to the linked term.

The process takes a step forward for WordPress bloggers. After installing the plug-in, Yahoo Shortcuts watches what one writes. After the post is completed, the plug-in's "Review this post" button leads to suggestions for Shortcut content.

Bloggers can leave suggested Shortcuts in place, or remove them as desired. When keeping the Shortcut, the blogger has the option to keep it as a link, or make it a badge that can be embedded in the post.

Yahoo's Flickr integration with the WordPress plug-in will be the feature that catches a log of attention. The company said in the Shortcuts description it searches for relevant, Creative Commons-licensed photos based on terms appearing in the post.

Photos can be resized and placed anywhere within a post. The plug-in automatically attributes the photos to their owners who have made them available under those Creative Commons terms.

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