Everyone knows how we love to talk about underrated players... but how about underrated Basketball-Reference tools? Because in my opinion, one of the most slept-on features on the site is the simple but amazingly useful Linkify Tool. What does it do? The name says it all -- it "linkifies" your text.

Say you've written a long piece about your favorite team, and you mention a lot of players in it, but their names just don't stand out. Well, maybe you want to make the names into links, which will simultaneously call attention to them and let your readers know more about the player if they click the link. And where to link? Well, where better than our player pages here at BBR? But it's such a pain to manually link every single name, isn't it? (Especially if you use a lot of tables or list a lot of player names in your articles.) That's why the Linkify tool delivers so well in the clutch: all you do is copy and paste your text into the Linkify box, and click the linkify button. Magically, the tool returns your text, but every time a player's name comes up, it will automatically link to his Basketball-Reference page.

Moreover, the Linkify tool is totally customizable -- you can specify whether your original text is in HTML format or BBCode/Forum Code, you can add line returns to the text, you can restrict links only to the names of active players, and you can even tell the tool to link partial names (like K. Bryant, for instance).

So the next time you've written something and want to breathe extra life into it by adding some cool links to the text, use the Linkify feature. You won't be sorry ...unless you compose your entire article in the linkify box despite our warnings against it, and you lose your article. In any other situation, though, it should be of great use to you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Site Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.