The gentle art of Re-blogging – made easy.

I’ve been trying to reblog some of the great content I see on my wanderings through the internet. Articles that interest, useful tips and advice, they all could do with a wider audience. Hence the reblogging, to help spread the word.

That was where the fun started. It’s not as simple as I thought it would be.

You might have noticed that this website is self-hosted. That means it uses wordpress.org, not wordpress.com. Despite the name, both are separate entities.

All I wanted to do was embed the link to my chosen post on my post, with most sites, this brings up a clickable preview. Not with wordpress.com sites though. For that, you need to use something called Jetpack, a WordPress plug-in that links wordpress.org to wordpress.com.

However (and there’s always a however isn’t there?), my hosting service doesn’t allow users to install Jetpack, for some technical reason. It was explained to me but I got lost at it’s because.

So it looked like I was going to have to cut and paste text and graphics, add links and do all sorts of messing around; before I could reblog anything. Fine, I thought, if that’s what it takes. It’s annoying but there you are.

I did it like that for a while, all the time thinking that there must be a better way to do it. Even without Jetpack. I kept searching for a way to make my life easier. It’s just the way I am.

And I found it!

There’s a WordPress plug-in called Visual Link Preview. It’s tested to version 5.3.1 of WordPress and it’s FREE. Simple to install and use, instructions are provided but you probably won’t need them. It gives you a block in your widgets directory, use this when you’re compiling a post instead of the usual embed one supplied with the basic installation. The block is supposed to work with any link, even internal ones. it certainly copes with the ones I’ve been unable to use up to now.

Here’s what I mean.

This is what you get if you try to embed a WordPress link conventionally.

This is what you get once Visual Link Preview is installed

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So, if you’re having trouble re-blogging and linking content, get Visual Link Preview installed and your blogging life will be so much easier.

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