Automatic Player Linker

Automatic Player Linker ▪ Add Your Blog to Our Player Newsfeeds

This tool allows you to automatically add links (via just a single click) to Basketball-Reference.com (BBR) player pages to:

• your blog posts,
• you bulletin board posts, and
• text you are reading on a website.

To do this, just add our bookmarklet and click it whenever you want to link to BBR pages. Javascript bookmarklets are like bookmarks, but slightly different. A bookmark contains an address for a web page and clicking on it sends you to that page. A bookmarklet is a set of javascript instructions for the browser. When you click the bookmarklet, your browser runs the javascript. Sometimes this will send you to a different page, but often it just changes what you see on the current page.

Add the Bookmarklet to Your Browser

To add the bookmarklet to your browser, you need to do one of the following things:

1. Click on, hold, and then drag the link below to your bookmarks or bookmarks bar (verified to work in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome).
2. Right-click on the link below and add to your favorites or bookmarks. Internet Explorer will ask you if you really want to do this. It asks this for all cases where you create a javascript bookmarklet since there is the possibility of security issues from untrustworthy sites.

BBR Linker Bookmarklet

To make sure you've done it right, edit the bookmark. The URL should appear like the following:

Customize the Bookmarklet

To customize the bookmarklet, set the options below and click the "Update Bookmarklet" button. You will have to add the updated bookmarklet to your browser in order to see the changes.

To make sure you've done it right, edit the bookmark. The URL should appear like the following:

How to Use with Blogs or Bulletin Boards

See a list of supported blog software below.

PLEASE SAVE ANY WORK prior to using the bookmarklet. While we have made a serious effort to never lose any of your content, we cannot make any guarantees.

In general, the easiest way to use the tool is to just write your post in the blog text box and click the bookmarklet in your brower. The tool grabs the text you wrote, runs it through our player linker and returns the text with links enclosed.

When using with blogs or bulletin boards for adding links to posts while composing, you must click the bookmarklet while using the "Edit Html" or "Html" view rather than the "Visual", "Rich Text", or "Compose" View. You can switch back and forth from the two views, so you can write in the Visual view, switch to the HTML view and click the bookmarklet.

Steps:

1. Save your draft.
2. Change into HTML view, if necessary.
3. Click the linker bookmarklet.
4. A "Working" notice should appear. After it disappears, all of the player names should be linked to their BBR pages.

» Want to give it a try? Test form entry here.

How to Use on a Web Page

If you select text on a web page (e.g., in an article at NBA.com or ESPN.com), it will replace the player names in the article with a link to their BBR page.

Steps:

1. Select the text you want to add links to.
2. Click on the linker bookmarklet.
3. A "Working" notice should appear. After it it disappears, all of the player names should be linked to their BBR pages.

» Want to give it a try? Test text selection here.

Currently Supported Web Pages and Software

• WordPress
• TypePad
• Blogger
• Joomla
• Movable Type 4 (may also work in 5, but have not tested)
• phpBB
• Invision
• vBulletin
• General web page text (can't be done for an entire page, only for a partial selection of the page)

» Can't find the software you use? Request support for other software here.

Notes

• Currently, the scripts only looks at players who played during the 2005-06 season or later.
• Names inside of links will be matched as well. To avoid this, write something like "Deron  Williams" with two spaces rather than "Deron Williams" with one space. It will render the same way in HTML since extra spaces are collapsed by default.
• Player names will be bolded and linked automatically.
• Names with multiple associated players will go to the BBR search engine results for that name.
• Search is by longest names to shortest names.
• No matching will occur across hard line returns.
• A name with a </a> after it will not be matched, so it won't overwrite existing links.