Imagine having a dymanic resource of related images, links and even tags that changes as you are typing a post for your blog. Enter Zemanta which seamlessly intergrates with your blogging platform whether you use WordPress, Tumblr, MySpace, Blogger, Ning to name a few.

There are a few ways to take advantage of what Zemanta offers. There are plugins for WordPress, MovableType and Drupal or it can be added to your web browser by way of an extention/plugin or even a bookmarklet.

To test Zemanta I installed the FireFox Extention. All the links within the text so far were added instantly with a single click. The Zemanta logo was also suggested by the service (along with the logos of the previously mentioned blogging platforms) and it was a simple case of dragging and dropping it in. Below are 3 web pages that were also recommended by Zemanta and added within seconds. Lots of resources added to a post very quickly.

The only minor downside is the additional (sometimes superfluous) HTML, that is added to your post, especially when you use one of the suggested images. In the example above there is even a ‘div’ tag that serves absolutely no purpose, it has no ‘id’ or ‘class’ attributes. You could edit and delete any HTML that you deem to be superfluous, but doing that would be counterproductive.

However, many elements do have ‘class’ attributes that would allow Zemanta content to be styled via CSS. If you were to use Zemanta on a regular basis it would be worth taking the time to create a style sheet so elements that you add using the service are in keeping with your blog’s design.

If related articles have been added with Zemanta, a link that reads, “5 more fresh articles…” is added. Unfortunately (at the time of writing) clicking this link reports an error, however, when working I’m sure that this simply loads and displays more related articles as suggested by Zemanta. (Indeed it does. Five additional links were neatly added to the list of related links.)

Finally a ‘reBlog’ button is automatically added at the bottom of your post. This makes it easy for readers to blog about your post by providing a quote and, “full attribution and a backlink.” At the time of writing I can’t test this feature but try it for yourself. The best way to see how this feature works is to try it. You’ll be presented with the Zemanta editor where you can easily select a paragraph to quote and a link back to this post will be generated. Once you have finished your reBlog entry you have the option to publish directly or copy the HTML. On the Zemanta website it says, “it’s like reTweet (RT) on Twitter, but for Blogs,” which seems like a fair description.

My only complaint about the reBlog feature is that the title of the post you are reblogging is not presented within the post. Secondly the title generated if you use the publish option rather than copying the HTML is less than satisfactory. (For example, “reBlog from co.uk: Blog24″ is the title provided if decide to reBlog and publish this post.)

Overall I do think that many blog writers will find Zemanta useful. The suggested links alone is a great timesaver, especially if your post mentions a number of people or companies.

Give it a go and let me know what you think.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Zemanta makes blogging while drinking easier (freakthenet.wordpress.com)
• Tutorial: Zemanta bookmarklet for Google Chrome (zemanta.com)
• Enhance your emails and blog posts with Zemanta (read2know.com)

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I must stress that this is a test for the Firefox blogging plugin ScribeFire and therefore some formatting may be unusual. I take that back — formatting was perfect!

ScribeFire is a plugin for Firefox which will turn the popular web browser into an editor for bloggers. ScribeFire supports many blogging services including; LiveJournal, Tumblr, Xanga and MySpace. Many blogging platforms such as WordPress, Moveable Type and Drupal, are supported too.

ScribeFire, an extension of Firefox ®, enables users to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Web into their blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize their ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser.

scribefire.com

Installing ScribeFire

The process of installing the ScribeFire is as easy as adding any other Firefox plugin. Once installed and you have restarted Firefox you are ready to set up ScribeFire to work with your blog.

Adding your blog’s details is very simple with the ‘Account Wizard’. Just enter the blog’s URL and click continue. You will be asked for your log in details for your blog and after a few seconds you will be ready to write new blog posts within Firefox.

Overview of the Editor

The editor will probably look familiar as it looks fairly standard. There are tabs to change between the standard editing mode and source editing and a third that allows you preview your blog post within your blog’s template. The third option sounds great but I’m not totally convinced that it is actually working, perhaps it will next time ScribeFire is used.

Apart from the standard text formatting buttons there are buttons to add links and images and a useful addition to add images from Flickr which opens a search window. Adding Flickr images is very simple. However, this useful search feature does not seem to be limited to photographs that you are legally allowed to use. Any time I use Flickr I limit my search to those that are covered by the Creative Commons licence using Flickr’s advanced search.

Adding images to a post is otherwise really simple. You can either use the editor button or simply drag an image from the browser window or your computer. Selecting an image by clicking on it then ‘right clicking’ on it brings up a menu from which you can select ‘Element Properties’ shown below.

The same contextual menu can be used to format selected text too.

To the far right of ScribeFire’s editor’s menubar their is a drop down menu, represented by a small triangle. This menu adds further options for formatting your post (justification and an option to add YouTube hosted videos, much in the same manner as the Flickr button.

Post options

To the right of the main editor is a tabbed area where you will find the Categories tab which lists all of the Categories that are set up on your blogs. Check the ones you want to publish your post in and, optionally, add a few tags below. The last tab, entitled ‘Options’ allows you to modify the timestamp, add Technorati tags and TrackBack URLs and has the option to enable Pings too.

The first two tabs entitle ‘Blogs’ and ‘Entries’ are fairly self-explanitory. The former is where you can add, edit and remove your weblogs details. The latter, ‘Entries’, lists all your blog’s posts allowing previous posts to be edited too. Until published your ‘posts’ are stored as ‘notes’, a list of which you will find under the ‘Entries’ tab too.

In fact you could use ScribeFox just for taking notes. Being able to drag text and images to the editor and saving them as notes could prove useful for some.

Publishing your post

Once a post has been completed it is a simple matter of pushing the publish button. A neat feature is the option to publish as a draft (if the blogging host or platform allows it). Also, as I am using WordPress there is also the option to publish the post as a Post or Page. (This will make sense if you use WordPress too.)

Options when publishing

Summary

If you are a blogger then I would highly recommend this plugin for the Firefox — at the very least give it a try. If you like, or need, to take notes while browsing the web then ScribeFire would suit that purpose too.

Using ScribeFire is easy and intuitive with its familiar editor layout. There are features that I have yet to use, but it will give you something to discover when trying for yourself.

A long time ago I tested a couple of blogging plugins for Firefox, I quickly uninstalled them as a I was not impressed. ScribeFire is different, it is a blog writing and note taking plugin that I will use in the future and will remain installed.

If you use ScribeFire or another Firefox pluging that enables blogging share your experiences and thoughts via the comments. Also feel free to recommend other blogging software, a particular favourite of mine has been Ecto for Mac, but having a blogging tool accessable within the browser seems to make sense to me.

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Like everyone else, I hate spam, whether it be email, via SMS or through the post — but most of all I hate comment spam on blogs. Luckily there is help with filtering out most of the spam when blogging, as a WordPress user I make use of the Akismet plugin.

Since using Akismet it has caught all the spam on this blog and only one legit comment (ham).

Once a fortnight, sometimes weekly, I quickly look through the comments that have been filtered out at spam by Akismet. Using the spacebar I can scroll and scan the list of junk-filled comments with ease. I do this just to make sure that there are no worthwhile, legitimate comments that have been filtered as spam. Comments that contain lots of URLs soon whizz past, whereas the shorter ones may actually be permissible, so those are read.

Very occasionally there are those that amuse:

• Interesting web page is, i’ll see you later one more timed
• Your guestbook is example of middle-class guestbooks. Congratulation!
• Just serfed in. Great site, guys!

Personally I like the way that there is a single ‘congratulation’ in the second comment.

Strangely the following religiously themed comments have been posted on Blog24 recently.

• These prayers help me to keep God in my life, especially with the many distractions I encounter.
• I have always wanted a compendium of novena prayers. Thank you for sharing all these prayers with us. It brings joy and happiness to everyone. I know, I do feel that way.
• I can find the prayer I want. I thank God for this website.

Please do not thank God — thank me, via the comments perhaps.

To conclude, I highly recommend using the Akismet plugin for WordPress, and other blogging platforms. Alternatively use a service such as Disqus to manage and publish comments on your blog. Disqus also uses Akismet to filter spam from comments.

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• links for 2008-11-14
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• links for 2008-08-13 [delicious.com]

Post Revisions allow WordPress users to track changes to posts with ease and restore earlier versions. (Mac users — we’ve got Time Machine for WordPress!)

The Press This! bookmarklet has been improved to make blogging about things you’ve read or seen on the web much easier and faster.

In WP2.5 uploading images to your blog was improved immensely. Once uploaded a caption could be added for each image. Unfortunately these captions would not be shown in your posts without editing the theme template files. However, with 2.6 installed your Captions will be added under your images automatically.

Still on the subject of images, it is now possible to change the order of Gallery images using ‘drag and drop’. Sweet!

Watch the following introduction of WordPress 2.6 for further information:

View a larger version of this video.

I do like the addition of the live Word Count. Useful for making sure that a post is not getting too prolix.

There will doubtlessly be many subtle updates and features to discover once installed. So I’m off to download and install WP 2.6 right now.

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Ardent blog readers will already be fed by some of the blogs mentioned in this Top 50 list and will doubtlessly wonder why some of their favourites are not included.

The Top 5

1. huffingtonpost.com
2. boingboing.com
3. techcrunch.com
4. kottke.org
5. dooce.com

This blog list will be useful for those wanting to explore blogs and find new interesting content to read.

From Prince Harry in Afghanistan to Tom Cruise ranting about Scientology and footage from the Burmese uprising, blogging has never been bigger. It can help elect presidents and take down attorney generals while simultaneously celebrating the minutiae of our everyday obsessions.

The World’s 50 Most Powerful Blogs

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Here’s what I wrote;

Personally I use ‘%post_title% presented by %blog_title%’ or ‘%post_title% on %blog_title%’ via the All In One SEO plugin for WordPress.

This makes the title element a sentence that is easier to read and probably scores lots of points for accessibility. I read somewhere that page readers (for the blind) read the separators that so many of use have used in our title tags.

For example this page’s title [on Mark's website] would be read out, “wordpress tip colon reorder your title tag left-pointing double angle quotation mark mark on wordpress.” How annoying is that?

Another comment, by Lodewijk gave another useful WordPress tip, it read;

And while you’re at it, you could also simply replace with your own blog name. It will reduce the amount of queries to the database by one for every pageview.

All he means by this is to replace %blog_title% with actual title of your blog. A simple suggestion but not good for distributed themes!

Think about the different places that the contents between the tags are shown. Most obviously, they appear at the top of the browser window. If readers use tabs with their web browser software, titles are shown there too. Bookmark a page and the title is used as a reference to where that bookmark points. The same applies to online bookmarking like del.icio.us and similar web services like digg.com and reddit.com. Drag a URL from a browser to your desktop and the title will be used.

For these reasons webpage titles must be descriptive and relevant to the page content. Ideally they will not contain separators such as colons ‘:’, pipes ‘|’, left ‘«’ or right-pointing double angle quotation marks ‘»’ and the like. Omitting these improves accessibility and, I would imagine, probably improve your SEO.

After Mark Jaquith’s tip links led me to the following SEO articles, all of which are worth reading if you want to optimize your website or blog for the search engines:

Semantic Header Markup Means Search Engines Will Understand Too
The Simplest Most Effective SEO Move You Can Make
Magnetic Headlines
The Sound of the Accessible Title Tag Separator

Update added on April 25, 2008

As mentioned in Phil Nash’s comment below screen reader users are used to punctuation being read out and the less verbose delimiters are acceptable. He uses double colons ‘::’, as I have done in the past, and I think that this is a suitable and acceptable delimiter, if required.

Conclusion

If you wanted to use your blog’s name and the post’s title along with a keyword or category then consider these three ways of formatting that information between the title tags.

Bad Title:
♦♦♦ $BlogName » $Category » $PostTitle ♦♦♦

Good Title:
$PostTitle :: $Category :: $BlogName

Screen Read Friendly Title:
$PostTitle presented by $BlogName and filed under $Category

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“Twitt(url)y is a service for tracking what URLs people are talking about as they talk about them on Twitter.”

This service might be useful for bloggers who have writers’ block.

Visit this website and you have an instant idea of which websites are currently creating a buzz on Twitter. Check the popular websites being posted on Twitter and hey presto, it could spark an idea for your blog. For instance at the time of writing the most Twittered URL is http://tinyurl.com/65da4q – this point to a photograph of a lecture room full of students most of which have Apple laptops. This image could be the inspiration for a number of articles.

Many people on Twitter do shorten URLs using services such as tinyurl and spurl but that does not matter. Twitturly visits all links on Twitter and the top 100 chart is worked out using the ‘final destination’ of those shortened URLs.

Overall the Twitturly service could prove to be a useful site to have bookmarked for reference. There must be some kind of useful mashup that uses this information, perhaps using Yahoo Pipes. Get your thinking caps on!

twitturly.com

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Matt mainly talks about the latest release of WordPress (2.5) minutes after its release. This video shows off WordPress 2.5′s new features but also serves as a great introduction to WordPress for new users.

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Even if you are not WordPress user John’s presentation is full of useful information and great tips that are easy to implement and should improve your blog’s success.

Grab and notepad and pen and maybe a coffee too:

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