Image by Peter ?uhalev via Flickr
Some of you might have noticed the little groups of links at the bottom of posts, or how my images on posts here have started having a cool hover effect where you can see the description and source of the image as an overlay. It’s all thanks to a cool tool I discovered via being linked to from another site.
It’s spreading around the web like wildfire and I personally think it’s one of the best WordPress plugins created for a long time. It’s content creation on performance enhancing drugs.
It’s Zemanta.
Zemanta is a content recommendation engine that runs in your side bar as you type your blog post. In fact, even as I’m typing this review about Zemanta it’s bringing up relevant links about the product, finding links that I an automatically link to in my blog post based on the content of the post, and also bringing up a list of images that I could use in it’s media gallery.
The other seriously good feature about Zemanta is that it’s made my SEO enhancing easy. All I have to do manually now is adjust my SEO slug (there’s a plugin for that), and fix my page title if I desire. Zemanta brings up a list of all the tags that I might want to categorise my blog post as. Brilliant!
There’s one of two features I don’t like, such as I haven’t figured out how to add more than one picture from the media gallery yet (is it even possible?), and I have found the the contextual linking seems to heavily favour Wikipedia, which is fine, I just don’t want thousands of links to Wikipedia. I think they get enough credit thank you very much.
A plugin to keep an eye on
This is definitely going to be on my watch list. I’ve already recommended it to some of my web design clients and for clients that I’m writing for it’s bringing up relevant links that because I don’t really know the industry as well as they do, I wouldn’t have even thought of linking to. It’s saving me from myself. Neat.
Anyway, give it a go, install Zemanta yourself and run it for a few blog posts and tell me what you think. I reckon it’s great so far and apart from my two tiny gripes it works well for me.
Are your posts Zemified?
Related articles by Zemanta
- Bloggers Get More Content with Zemanta (asktheblogster.blogspot.com)
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- Zemanta–Blogging Assistant (sophisticatedfinance.typepad.com)
- Zemanta – Making Blogging a Whole Lot Easier (robert.sanzalone.com)
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Ohhhh. I was so hopeful, but it turns out you HAVE to write your blog posts in visual mode for Zemanta to work. I don’t even have that mode enabled and I’m not really interested in using it.
I have seen the tag suggestion part in my Simple Tags plugin, so I’ll need to investigate that aspect of it more.
Lynda Giddens´s last article: Mr Toad
Haha, yes indeed. I use both the HTML and visual editor when I write blog posts so it’s not too much hassle to switch between the two.
Out of curiousity, what is your reasoning behind not using the visual editor at all?
I prefer to code the HTML for my entry myself. I use a lot of floats and CSS to align my images and I just don’t like being messed with.
Lynda´s last article: Friday Finds- Boats & Introduction
That’s a fair call, for an image intensive website it can pay to look at the code more closely. Personally I find that the Visual editor gets me about 80% of the way there, then I switch over to the HTML editor for touch ups.
Always interesting to see how other people work!
I decided to suck up my snobbery and use the visual editor just to get the zemanta links. Interesting so far. I might go back through some of my old posts to see what it comes up with.
Lynda Giddens´s last article: Is It Luck 4 Tips To Win Giveaways
Haha, good on you for giving it a go!
I find it works best for longer posts, the tag recognition and suggestions doesn’t seem as accurate for short posts. Also I’ve found one bug when inserting pictures, it previews OK, then if you schedule and visit the page after it’s published the image placement can be out of wack. To fix it, just make a small change using the WordPress image editor and it works fine.