One of the most panicking idea about the new Linden Labs guidelines is that thousands of bloggers may now have to remove infringing contents from their blog. But if you own a Wordpress self-hosted blog (maybe even a Wordpress.Com blog), NO NOT PANIC! Ubernyms is a very slick way of mass rewriting your blog without sweat.

Legal things better left to lawyers as far as I’m concerned, this article is NOT about HOW to make your blog compliant to the new policy. IANAL and I have no idea yet of all the legal implications. This article will focus on the technical aspect of installing Ubernyms and not on the legal aspects. For that you will have to read Linden Lab’s policies throughly, personally I don’t even know how it will affect bloggers. LL ain’t very good at communicating important decisions like that anyways, but that is another subject completely.

NOTE: Ubernyms may not be compatible with all Wordpress plugins. I heard it conflicted with other plugins. I CANNOT offer support for any aspect of it, as I do not develop Ubernyms. Consider this a primer to the matter, no more.

STEP 1 : Installing Ubernyms

This is the most tricky part, since the installation can be different on one host or another. So I cannot explain all of it, but will try to give it a shot.

Basically installation consists of:

1. Download Ubernyms for the right version of Wordpress
2. Put that .ZIP file into your /wp-content/plugins directory and unzip it on the server OR unzip the file locally and put the folder and all of it’s content in the /wp-content/plugins/ directory through FTP
3. Activate the plugin in your Plugins section of your Wordpress blog administration panel
4. INSTALL SignpostMarv Ubernym patch that fixes a bug with the HTML characters and UTF-8/accented characters. Go there and download the ubernyms-2.7.php.txt file and rename it to ubernyms.php. Then upload it via FTP in the Ubernyms plugin directory, and overwrite the old one.

STEP 2 : Configuring Ubernyms

Once installed, Ubernyms is delicious cake. And you must eat it.

1. Go into the Plugins section, and click on Ubernyms Configuration
2. Leave the upper configuration as is, it is usually defaulting a decent configuration
3. What is of utter interest for this case is the Replace Text option. Take a free slot under “Add new acronyms” and select Replace Text.
4. Enter a term in the Text field, and the replacement term in Definition

For example, let’s say that you want to replace the acronym “SL” for “SL ™”, you would have to put “SL” in the Text field and “SL ™” in the Description field (you should use the HTML code for the trademark sign in this case). SignpostMarv issued a patch fixing a problem with this, thanks to him for the leet patchage!

This plugin can replace any expression in your entire blog in a second, not only for replacements, you can link to internal or external URLs, replace acronyms by full length expressions, and so on. It’s the blogger’s best friend, you can take my word on that.

Hope this will calm down some lovely people I know that got very stressed up with their blog infringing on Linden Labs trademarks, thinking it would be required to correct every article posted by hand. This plugin removes much of the job. It still needs to be proven if it is really necessary. <3