SimonWaldman.net

Any of you who actually visit this blog rather than take a look at it in a news reader will notice that things have changed around here in terms of design. I’m a bit annoyed with myself because when I started blogging again, I promissed I would spend hours messing about with WP templates..but when I found out the old one was broken, then whoosh..before you know it, I’ve tried out a couple of dozen, before finally settling on this – a much appreciated free offering from DesignDisease, who deserve a bit of a plug.

The flexibility of WP continues to amaze, though. I’m just putting together a site for Wisley Airfield [long story, I'll tell you another time] anyway – it’s not really a blog, but I wanted it to be in WP.

Anyway – first stop ended up being WPMagThemes which was good, but didn’t have quite what I was looking for. But, I followed an ad from there to the RevolutionTheme – perfect..even if I had to pay $80 for it.

Back at Seedcamp in the Summer, I met the guys behind what was then a very wizzy little app called Zemanta. They went on to win it, which was great, even though I felt is was a solution looking for a problem. But then, hey – what do I know?

It effectively scanned a piece of copy and then recommended tags for it, looked up relevant pics on Flickr and also found relevant stories from around the web and articles on Wikipedia.

Anyway, this morning, I got an e-mail announcing that Zemanta is now ready to try out. It works as a Firefox plug in and then provides suggestions along side the editing window for Blogger, or WordPress (yes, even WordPress when you’re hosting it yourself). The screen grab above gives you an idea of how it looks.

It also has a terribly neat thing – that you can see above where it provides links to Wikipedia articles or company home pages, and you just click ‘Apply all’ and they all get edited in.

It’s terribly neat – and unsurprisingly seems to work much better as your posts get longer.

Definitely worth a try.