Zemanta plugin and Wordpress 2.7

Zemanta plugin and WordPress 2.7

Posted by BigWhale on November 20th, 2008 in Computers | 0 comments

WordPress 2.7 is currently in Beta3 stage and we can soon expect a final 2.7 release. This release is pretty much feature packed, Web TwoZero-fied and it looks really smooth. Writing blogs is even simpler and faster.

However, writing good content with a lot of references, links and added images can be a pain, no matter what you do. Here’s where Zemanta comes in play. They provide you with a plugin that will automagically extract various keywords from your text and get back to you with all sorts of references to those keywords. With a simple click you can add multiple links to your post. Read on!

How is it done?

I could open up the source code of plugin and look into it to get the basic idea on what is happening under the hood of our WordPress installation. I could read the entire Zemanta API companion. I could. But being a lazy ass I just asked one of their developers Jure Čuhalev for some more detailed information about their plugin. In the end I ended up bugging two of their developers asking all sorts of questions, necessary and unnecessary. :)

So now, really in a very very shot nutshell. Your text is sent to api.zemanta.com where your buzzwords are extracted and compared to their local Wikipedia indexes, their blog aggregates and DMOZ directory. Api then returns relevant links, related articles and appropriate tags. You will also get a relevant subset of images that you can use in your post. Since bloggers are more or less their primary, but not at all their only, users Zemanta plugin will return content with blog friendly licenses. So, you’ll get Creative Commons and GFDL licensed images that you can freely include in your post. For image searches Zemanta will use flickr and daylife.

If you register with Zemanta you’ll get a nice little bag of assorted cookies with your registration. You’ll be able to include your flickr, facebook or twitter account. Zemanta will recognize your friends and link to them. If that is not enough, you can make a list of your own blogs and OPML’s and they will be used in searches for related articles.

WordPress plugin is not the only thing that Zemanta has to offer. If you can’t add plugins to your WordPress installation, then you can use Zemanta Firefox Extension or internet explorer plugin. I didn’t really tried those since I find browser extensions and plugins that are raping HTML source code a rather intrusive. I guess I’ll have to get used to it sooner or later since this is something that will become more and more frequent and it is already used on a daily basis by various ad-blockers.

Since Zemanta is not targeting only bloggers they have developed plugins for drupal and I’m sure more CMSes will be supported in the future.

How to use it?

So, how to use Zemanta plugin? First you download it. Unzip it and transfer it to wp-content/plugins directory and then turn it on in Plugin section of WordPress. Then, write your post. Relevant keywords will be added below edit window. Each keyword will be shown as drop-down menu and if more than one search result is returned you’ll be able to select others from that menu. Images that are fit for your post will be displayed on the right side of edit windows and below them are related articles. Moving your mouse over a thumbnail of image will bring up description of image and its license type. You’ll get a nice link to the image which will open in a new browser tab. Adding related links is rather simple. Find them in the list on the right and click on them. Click them again and they will disappear from the list of related articles in your post.

Is there anything missing?

At the first glance no. If you want to use Zemanta plugin on a blog that has more than one authors you are better off with Firefox extension for each author. There is no support for personal settings in WordPress plugin. I also miss a customizable related article list. Current list is, with one word, ugly. :) Ability to set the time on how often plugin will query api.zemanta.com would be nice too. Other than that I didn’t find any other serious drawbacks and bugs. I noticed that rotating update arrows got stuck and didn’t disappear when update was finished. Funny, no matter that I mentioned Zemanta at least half of dozen times in my post it didn’t help with showing zemanta as a tag or keyword. I had to add it manually. Also the keyword CC didn’t relate to Creative Commons license, writing this sentence helped. ;)

And now, let me hit Publish button and see what happened.

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