MDBG Dictionary Plugin for WordPress
Ok everyone (Joel), the suspense is over.
I have been working with (read: begging) MDBG for the past few weeks to develop and test something that will make self-hosted WordPress bloggers’ lives better.
I’m very proud to announce the arrival of the MDBG wordpress plugin (fanfare please)!
My favorite feature is the automatic linking of all hanzi in posts and comments (!) to the MDBG dictionary. This is especially useful for my “power pidgin” writing style when I often write a sentence with English and Chinese hùn zài yìqǐ 混在一起 and I don’t want to have to explain every word. But it also includes a pinyin tone converter that turns “hun4 zai4 yi4qi3″ into “hùn zài yìqǐ” (with an optional link to pinyin pronunciation files).
That reminds me of a question I’ve been wanting to ask everyone (not just you Joel):
What do you use to make pinyin tones on your computer?
Before this plugin I always used this.
As a final bonus, if you use the plugin on your blog, you get added to a special VIP list at the bottom of the plugin page!
If anyone else is using some sort of auto-linking dictionary plugin, let us know how this one compares.
Can anyone who has a self-hosted WordPress blog think of a reason NOT to use the MDBG plugin at least for automatic linking in comments?
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16 Responses to “MDBG Dictionary Plugin for WordPress”
Ingo
said:
Albert, pretty cool idea!
Comment date: Jun 3, 2009
Joel
said:
installed.
question: will it open the links in a new tab/window, or the current tab? I won’t want to use it if it’s gonna take people away from my blog.
For pinyin tone marks, i thought you knew about this already. Been using this or a while, by far the easiest and fastest way to get pinyin with tone marks (highlight and click): http://toshuo.com/2009/pinyin-input-firefox-extension/
Comment date: Jun 4, 2009
Albert
said:
Joel,
All the links are automatically target=”_blank” so that the links open a new window.
As for the firefox extension, does that work for you when you’re writing wordpress posts? I can get it to work in the title of a post (single line text box) but not in the body of the post (multi-line textarea).
Comment date: Jun 4, 2009
Joel
said:
I’ve never had trouble in post body area – that’s where i use it most. I don’t use the WYSIWYG editor.
Comment date: Jun 4, 2009
Alec
said:
To answer your question, I use the Google pinyin IME.
Comment date: Jun 5, 2009
Beijing Sounds
said:
I’ve always used pinyinput, an IME from imron of Chinese Forums. Very stable and useful and works in almost anyplace on Windows. But I’m curious to try the above-mentioned google pinyin, since pinyinput has one weird bug I can’t work around sometimes
Comment date: Jun 9, 2009
Rachel
said:
Just joining this conversation. Is there not a way to just do it with a PC keyboard? See, I’ve been using a Mac and you can just use the option button and then +a for first tone, +e for second tone, +v for 3rd tone, and +` for 4th tone. I just bought a PC am editing the last 2 chapters of my book and it’s driving me nuts. I don’t want to fuss around with cutting and pasting. I downloaded something from one of the above links and it made my font look funny and all different sizes. Anyone can help with PC short cut to pinyin tones?
Comment date: Jun 23, 2009
Joel
said:
also, when are you gonna do a post on Chinese punctuation and how to type it? It’s driving me nuts that I can’t make those other kind of commas. I did it once, and then forgot.
Comment date: Jun 23, 2009
Beijing Sounds
said:
@Rachel, the tool I mentioned, pinyinput, does just what you want (you type 1, 2, 3 or 4 after a syllable to mark the tone). You can download from
http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?t=13005
and here are some more instructions:
http://chinalinks.osu.edu/computing/pinyinput.pdf
You’ll wonder how you ever survived without it.
Comment date: Jun 23, 2009
大羽
said:
My friend told me a website few days ago. that’s http://www.visualchinese.com
I found at the right bottom of the page, there are two small gadgets. I can use that convert Chinese characters to Pinying tone.
Comment date: Jun 23, 2009
Expatrate in Taiwan
said:
This is great! Installed on my blog and already going through and redoing posts with [hanzi] tags.
Do you have any plans to make a Firefox/Thunderbird plugin? Something similar to Chinese Perakun/Mandarin Popup? I think we are sorely in need of a Chinese Popup Mozilla addon that will show definitions from MDBG!
Nice work and thanks again!
Comment date: Jul 10, 2009
Jeannie
said:
Wow…awesome info! Too bad I’m using Blogger but I’m planning to transfer to WordPress. Wish me luck…:)
Comment date: Feb 10, 2010
Jeannie
said:
Albert, do you know if that plugin work in WordPress.com?
Thank you!
Comment date: Sep 25, 2010
Albert
said:
Jeannie,
I THINK it’s only for “self-hosted” WordPress sites. But I don’t know anything about WordPress.com because I’ve never used it.
Comment date: Sep 25, 2010
Tamil Dictionary
said:
is this work with latest wordpress,
Comment date: Mar 27, 2011