Playing with my blog

After all, if I can’t play with my own blog, what can I play with?
I’ve been updating some of the plugins and widgets that I use to customize WordPress. While I was doing this, I decided to add a new feature which some of my colleagues at Amazon have been working on: “Context Links”. The idea is that a bit of Amazon JavaScript scans my HTML, looking for a few interesting phrases which can be linked to Amazon products. The phrases are marked with double underlines, and mousing over will trigger a small product popup.
In the past, I’ve tried various pop-over plugins, like the notorious Snap!, and the reaction has been overwhelmingly negative. The problem with Snap! is that every link triggers a pop-up with a thumbnail of the page, which really gets in the way if you simply want to click on a link. Hopefully Context Links will be more acceptable. The feature is still in beta, and I’m doing this more to help out my friends than anything else. (I’ve never been tempted to try to monetize my blog.) You won’t necessarily see any of the links: I get the impression that there is a lag between my changing the page and a new set of links being generated. (I’ll have to ask the author.)
The other big change that I made was to add in the All-in-one SEO Package, a plugin which rewrites the page titles, cleans up the meta tags, and generally does everything it can to make the site as clean as possible to Google and the other search engines. Right now, this is what Google sees: almost every entry is prefixed with “Geoff Arnold » Blog Archive » “, except for a few links to the old Movable Type entries which I’ve left in place. ((They’re duplicated in the new WordPress blog, but I can’t figure out how to easily forward the old URLs to the new pages, because the database keys don’t line up neatly.)) I’ll check agan in a few days to see if anything’s changed.