An SEO Software Story
Some months ago, I received an inquiry about creating software to use for search engine optimization. The result is a wonderful SEO tool, easy to use and, most important of all, effective — a tool that does what it says it does.
When I received the specifications, I was thrilled. Not only because of what the tool could do, but also for a selfish reason. The project would let me polish a skill I had recently acquired, to update WordPress sites using remote software.
To refine a skill while coding software that people can actually use and profit from, and which looked every bit like a fun project, seemed ideal. And so it proved to be.
At the time I received the inquiry, I was quite busy with other custom software projects. But I wanted so much to also do this that I managed to fit it in.
Let me mention two features of the Cinderella project that excited me.
Snippets
When I saw the specifications for this feature, it reminded me of an idea generator I wrote as practice when I was learning programming back in the early 1980's.
The idea generator was intended for writers, something to spew out sentences for stimulating creativity. It had a list of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, and other parts of speech, which it combined in random ways to print the creativity-stimulating content.
Be that as it may, the spintax implementation of the snippets feature reminded me of that decades-earlier programming practice.
With the snippets feature, you specify text to be used by other Cinderella features. Spintax allows you to give any snippet the ability to make a choice between two or more words or phrases — as many different sets of choices as you want, even spintax nested within spintax if you want to get highly creative.
Very, very powerful, once a person realizes the potential and takes advantage of it.
It made me smile with pleasure because it gives you the ability to automatically generate many versions of any one snippet.
And it was fun to code :-)
Cindy Links
Imagine being able to do this and you'll perhaps understand why it was such a pleasure to code the feature:
There's a list of your posts and pages to link to. You choose one.
Then you choose which posts (or all posts of a certain category) shall link to the post or page you already selected.
Select which snippet or snippets shall be used for the link. And specify the anchor text.
If you wish, you can specify your posts be re-published with the current date.
The last step is to click the button.
That's all it takes. It's all done for you.
Fun, fun to code.
One more?
Videolizer
When I saw the specifications for this feature, I immediately realized how ingenious it really is.
This feature lets you insert on-topic YouTube videos into as many posts and pages as you wish, with a choice of positions for the inserted video.
Click the button and it does it all for you.
Wow.
The Real Conclusion
The conclusion is what you read about on the sales page.
I was going to link straight to the page. But when I mentioned I'll be writing a blog post about my participation in the project, a member of the team insisted I use an affiliate link. "If you're going to send traffic to us, you might as well get rewarded," was the argument.
I accepted the reasoning. Here's the link.
The Cinderella Conclusion (or a New Beginning)
The Cinderella team was fun to work with.
Although located in three different countries, they proved to be an efficient team, each honorable, confident, and experienced in their individual field.
Will Bontrager
