WordPress Publisher Blog

Over email I asked Zemanta’s Director of Products, Boštjan Špetiča, to discuss his firm’s new blogging discovery / auto-suggestion service and the WordPress plugin they recently released:

What is Zemanta?

Zemanta helps you create rich posts by recognizing your topic and suggesting useful links, tags, and pictures. So it makes the web experience nicer for both authors and their readers. Zemanta is a relaxed state of mind, where you focus on creativity instead of tricking the search engines to show what you are looking for.

How was the company formed, and where are you located?

The company is based in London and all our development is based in Slovenia, where the founders are from. Our core contextual technology was developed for a project for generating online archives of national television.

After that, we figured it’s a shame nobody is making this experience available to everyone online. We applied for Seedcamp, a European version of Y-combinator, won, and then moved everybody to London for a three-months geek picnic experience. Since then we’ve raised funding and launched the service in March of ’08.

Why should bloggers use the Zemanta WordPress plugin?

It’s painless, it’s pleasant, it takes most the friction out of creating the content. The question is, why would anyone not use it?

Describe the process you took to create the WordPress plugin.  Any lessons learned about plugin development you could share with others?

When we first started working on Zemanta WordPress plugin, we did not know much about WordPress platform or PHP. So we set a modest goal of making a plugin for version 2.5.

We were pleasantly surprised by the amount of information you can find on Codex or when that is not enough, in the WP community. Our advice to those, who might follow our footsteps would be to read introductory articles on Codex and read relevant parts of code of other popular plugins that perform similar tasks. It’s amazing how quickly you may reach your goal even if you are a novice when it comes to PHP and WP.

How is Zemanta different from other related-content products and services?

Some only offer some of the functionality (i.e. tags), some only help the readers instead of authors, some are simply hard to use. We are a one-stop-shop with special attention paid to usability and design.

We are also offering access to increasing number of premium content, where we make sure it is appropriately licensed. Sometimes people think we are just an interface to some picture search, while we actually do much more to deliver only the best select images.

What’s been the most surprising event since you launched your product?

Fred Wilson blogging about it. Twice.

What new features do you have on the roadmap that users of your WordPress plugin can look forward to?

Most prominent new feature on the roadmap is the ability to limit suggestions to your preferred trusted sources, or your friends or your own feeds. Along with more freedom at layouts, this will make our service very much personalized, as it should be in the social media.

Thanks Boštjan for your time. You can read more about Zemanta on their site, and download their WordPress plugin from the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.

Boštjan is the Director of Products at Zemanta, and blogs frequently at bostjan.konstrukt.it.

Brad Touesnard recently contacted us to let us know that he and his team launched a redesign for the British Columbia Cancer Agency’s 1.888.GOHAVE1 Web site.

This very important public health site, which is entirely powered by WordPress, utilizes a series of plugins including ajax comments, and email-a-friend:

[ Visit 1-888-GoHave1 ]

Kineda, which focuses on “Global Fusion of Fashion and Lifestyle”,  is a fabulous looking site that is part blog, part lookbook, and is running on WordPress and bbPress:

Terry from Kineda highlights the efforts:

The blog still offers our comprehensive fashion and lifestyle blog features, while the lookbook offers a rare glimpse at what our half a million readers are wearing right this moment.

New Kineda Features include:

* Single Sign-on to Blog and Lookbook
* Custom Profiles with Avatars
* Photo Upload with Automatic Cropping and Logo Watermark
* Ability to Rate Looks
* Custom Sorting of Looks by Most Viewed, Top Rated, etc.
* Share or Comment on any Look

The lookbook idea is really well executed and an innovative way to use bbPress:

[ Visit Kineda.com and the Kineda.com Lookbook ]

Keeping your WordPress setup up-to-date is a critical component of your overall security strategy along with strong passwords, and a secure hosting environment.

As Matt points out in a recent post, with each new version of WordPress it has become easier to be notified of updates, new plugins, and in WordPress 2.5 there is even a one-click auto-update feature for plugins.

In addition, one-click updating of the core WordPress software is something that’s being actively tackled for future versions of WordPress.

So what’s the best way to update your WordPress ? Matt has a good summary:

Upgrade your blog to the latest WP. This shouldn’t be hard. There are plugins for it, if you’re techy use Subversion, there is the standard FTP method, and finally Media Temple, Dreamhost, and Bluehost (through SimpleScripts) all have been pretty good about having their one-click upgrade systems ready with new versions within a day or two of a release. If your host is chronically behind, vote with your wallet and switch.

• If you need someone to help you upgrade, consider hiring help on the wp-pro mailing list. (It has close to a thousand subscribers and consultants on it.) Or you could always ply a geeky friend with caffeine, libations, food, or gadgets. Just get them to setup a system lik the above so you can do it yourself next time.

Change your passwords, for yourself and any other users you have on the system. If the attacker grabbed your password when you were on an old version, they can still log in after you’ve upgraded if you don’t change it. There’s a new password strength meter in 2.5 helps you pick a good password.

Search through your posts for any that might have been modified, and comb through the directories on your web server looking for anything out of the ordinary. Your host may be able to help you with the latter.

And big picture, if maintaining and upgrading doesn’t sound like something that your organization wants to tackle and you are hosting your blogs on your own infrastructure, consider hosting with a provider that offers one-click upgrades ( we list a few here ) or hosting on WordPress.com VIP.

[ via Photomatt ]

Great story in the New York Times yesterday about Phil Hughes and his WordPress.com blog philhughes.wordpress.com :

Hughes has seen a lot on his Web site, philhughes.wordpress.com, since starting it Jan. 16. Through Monday afternoon, the site had attracted more than 340,000 visitors from six continents.

Hughes has posted entries on 27 of the first 41 days, offering contests, chats, song lists and the occasional cellphone picture — an alligator on a golf course, Ian Kennedy’s changeup grip, buckets of fan mail in the clubhouse.

Be sure to check out philhughes.wordpress.com and for you Redsox fans, Curt Schilling’s Official Blog 38pitches.com is also hosted at WordPress.com.

Looking to blog from your mobile device ? You are in luck ! WordPress offers lots of different ways to keep blogging even on the go.

On WordPress.com we have m.wordpress.com. It’s a very light and speedy version of the admin dashboard, and works well on smart phones like the iPhone, BlackBerry and Treo.

On the mobile WordPress.com site you can post, manage comments, see stats, and basically do everything you normally would do. Just point your mobile browser to m.wordpress.com and login with your username and password.

For self-hosted WordPress there are several plugins for mobile usage including WPhone and the iPhone / Mobile Admin plugin:

Mobile Admin adapts the WordPress admin UI to be more friendly to mobile devices, specifically phones.

The iPhone / iPod Touch browser was the first target, but most other mobile browsers are supported at a basic level, and plugins can be used to customize for specific browsers where desired.

In addition, there are a ton of exciting mobile WordPress projects being worked on within the larger WordPress community — stay tuned !

One of the great many things about WordPress is the vast support for languages and truly international community of contributors. The WordPress community continues to create many language specific Themes, translation files, and support documentation.

Weblog Tools Collection recently highlighted that self-installed WordPress now supports Kazakh - bringing the total number of languages supported to 58.

Similarly, WordPress.com also has extensive language support, and features language specific sections like the Blogs of the Day.

A great way to learn more about WordPress and meet people from the WordPress community is to attend WordCamp.

What is WordCamp ? It’s an “informal gathering of WordPress users where we teach, learn, eat, drink and generally have fun with one another.”

Dallas WordCamp will be held in the George A. Purefoy Municipal Center in Frisco, Texas on March 29th and 30th of this year.

At the last WordCamp in San Francisco this past summer, it was great to see the strong turnout and diverse set of attendees and presenters. Jeremy Zilar of the New York Times captured it well on this blog post:

Well, camp is over, and all the campers have returned back to their nests. For those of you that missed out on the event, I would highly consider attending WordCamp 2008.

For more information & registration options for this upcoming Dallas WordCamp, please visit dallas.wordcamp.org.