Link Previews, and How to use them Correctly

I found an article on Lorelle on Wordpress about the impact of plugins/features that hover a preview for a link when the user does a mouseover on it, specifically reffering to Snap Preview.

I have to say that I find Snap Preview especially annoying, since I live in a country which often gives me bandwidth problems, and I do not actually want the preview to download each time I come near a link, its especially annoying when I actually wanted to click on the link anyway.

I have seen some sites which do this properly (Lorelle gives a couple of examples in her post).

Just as I was thinking about this article, I ran across another blog, vibe technology (note, the article itself, while an interesting read, has nothing to do with this topic), which I think has a very good application for the preview feature. On their site, when the mouse goes over an internal link, it displays a short summary of the link destination, which I think is very useful.

Of course, implementing this for an external link would b a lot more difficult, but I think it might be a nice idea, so that the writer of the article can simply specify the text popped up when the user hovers over the link (It would have been useful in  this article for the note following the link to vibe technology), or possibly it could use the description meta tag (if the destination site has one).

Anyway, it will go on my list of ideas for plugins/widgets, but if anybody knows of such a plugin, please let me know!

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3 Responses to 'Link Previews, and How to use them Correctly'

  1. Lorelle - January 19th, 2007 at 9:21 am

    Actually, if you want a text “description” to popup when hovering over the link, just add it to your link tag.

    <a href=”http://example.com/” title=”Description of the link here”>Link</a>

    I see you aren’t using them in your blog post content, and they are required by web standards. For example, the link to my site would feature this hover over Lorelle on WordPress.

    Simple and easy, and meets the standards for web accessibility. Nothing fancy. And certainly not covering most of your content or distracting.

  2. Nenad - January 19th, 2007 at 11:11 am

    I didn’t actually mean the standard title tags, they generally do not allow for a description of any length, and they look fairly ugly. I was thinking of something that will display a couple of rows of text, which still looks good.

    I will add the title tags to my posts from now on, I see what you mean by usability. I guess I just forgot about them, since I never read them myself.

    Thanks for the feedback!

  3. Joe - January 20th, 2007 at 3:50 am

    Yep, Lorelle is right on. I use title=”long description” on Vibe Technology / VibeTalk. However, it’s not automatic. If you look in the article you reference, I did this for external links too. I think there’s a title maker plugin out there somewhere you might use.

    For display, I use a plug-in called WS-Tooltips by Christopher Hartmann. This allows a more useful display of the title which degrades gracefully.

    I made some small modifications to widen the box and cut off the domain name in the link if the URL is long (it just seems useless to display it otherwise - it’s always cut off). I only spent a few minutes doing this, so it’s a bit of a hack. Ideally you would dynamically adjust the width via code…


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