There have been rumors about the pairing circling around the internet for the past couple of months. Heliocity had even commented on this, but the two companies had stayed mum denying the rumors — until last Friday.

I received an email from Helio announcing the upcoming merger. Heliocity covered the announcement. Virgin Mobile is acquiring Helio.

To be honest, I’m a bit conflicted about the whole thing. On one hand, VM could bring some very cool services to Helio customers. Their negotiations with Sprint may lower our rates. All of the Helio products will continue to be carried: all apps, games, and including “in process” and upcoming devices such as the Ocean 2 (a.k.a. OZ2). From what I can tell, nothing will change service-wise for quite some time, if at all.

On the other hand though, the Helio label will be no more. No more cool blue flame logo. And as silly as it may sound, that will mean no more Helio fanlisting, no more Helio blogroll, etc. No more Helio, no more anything that embodies being a Helion — and that saddens the Hell out of me.

Just an FYI for anyone using this plugin…

I have moved my Blank Target Replacement plugin to WordPress.org for better version tracking and visibility — and not to mention auto-updates for those using it. (not that I don’t want my users to come back to my site often, but even *I* have to admit that WP auto plugin update thingy is NICE!)

Version Change

If you are using this plugin, please download and install the latest version (1.0) via the link below at your convenience. All previous versions are also available there (for those of you who aren’t using WP 2.5x).

Proceed with caution; and as always, feedback and bug reports are ALWAYS welcome here!

Download

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/blank-target-replacement/

My Blank Target Replacement plugin has been updated again to play nicer with WP 2.5x.

Requires

WordPress version 2.5+ (older versions may not be supported, use at your own risk)

Instructions

Download

Click here to download the latest version.

Caveats / Issues

I did this pretty much on the fly. If you have any Blogroll links that have other rel attributes assigned (i.e. me, neighbor, met, etc. - any of the options under Link Relationship/XFN), you may experience problems getting the link(s) to open in a new window. Best thing is to clear out any existing XFN attributes for each link.

Same thing goes for links in posts that use lightbox or another setting for the rel attribute. It may or may not work.

I have not found a graceful work-around for these yet.

Disclaimer

Use at your own risk. No warranty expressed or implied is provided. There is no guarantee that this will work for your version of WordPress, I wrote this out of need for myself and am sharing in the hopes someone else finds it useful.

Copyright / Permission

This plugin is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Have fun!

A comment left on my plugin announcement post has pointed me in a new direction. It turns out that this function indeed DOES exist in WordPress, but it is highly under-documented barely mentioned in the WordPress Codex. I think initially my searches were too narrow, which is why I never ran across any of the following information.

Gonahkar’s comment gave me something new to search on, and I was able to find it mentioned in the WordPress Codex under WordPress Files:

A note at the top of the page states that the file descriptions are for WordPress Version 2.x. I was unable to find this file mentioned anywhere else in the documentation. However, under WordPress Features I stumbled across a reference to the export function:

Very cute, guys … c’mon, where is the rest of the documentation on this? From this point, I clicked through to the section on the Links Manager. The page starts with the following:

However, the export feature is not mentioned again on the page, nor any others pertinent to WordPress’ current release. The only other mention that I was able to find was this:

These are from the WordPress 1.2 changelog, which tells me that this ability has most likely been in WordPress a while. It’s highly possible it’s been forgotten, or maybe it’s been left out for a good reason. I can’t but speculate as to its reason … but at least now I know it does exist.

I may revise my plugin in the next few days to include this information and will most likely alter its purpose/function.

I’ve updated my Blank Target Replacement plugin by adding a feature: any links contained in posts and pages will automatically have rel="external" added.

Requires

WordPress version 2.2 or higher — may work with previous versions, I hadn’t tested!

Instructions

Download

Click here to download the latest version. The earlier version (minus content links auto mod) is still available here.

Caveats / Issues

I did this pretty much on the fly. If you have any Blogroll links that have other rel attributes assigned (i.e. me, neighbor, met, etc. - any of the options under Link Relationship/XFN), you may experience problems getting the link(s) to open in a new window. Best thing is to clear out any existing XFN attributes for each link.

Same thing goes for links in posts that use lightbox or another setting for the rel attribute. It may or may not work.

I have not found a graceful work-around for these yet.

Disclaimer

Use at your own risk. No warranty expressed or implied is provided. There is no guarantee that this will work for your version of WordPress, I wrote this out of need for myself and am sharing in the hopes someone else finds it useful.

Copyright / Permission

This plugin is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Have fun!