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Filed under: Blogging, Productivity

Zemanta: it's like cruise control for blogging

ZemantaIf you love writing, but hate the grunt work of blogging - like inserting relevant links, tags, and images, Zemanta might be for you. It's available as an add-on for Firefox or Internet Explorer, and a plug-in for Wordpress or Movable Type, and it automatically adds some useful stuff to your blog posts in progress on most of the major blogging platforms. It suggests links and applies them to the relevant words in your post with one click, and it also provides tags and a gallery of Creative-Commons-licensed Flickr photos you can drop in.

Zemanta currently supports Wordpress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, TypePad and Blogger, so the majority of blogs should be able to make use of it. It might be too blunt an instrument if you've got a really specific linking scheme going on at your blog, but for a post like this one, it came in handy: it automatically linked the word Zemanta to zemanta.com. Hey, we were going to do that by hand anyway. More importantly, it also grabs links to stories from places like CNN, the New York Times, and Technorati.

[via WebWare]

Filed under: Design, Internet, Blogging, Productivity, Web services, Search

Mint web stats package updated, new outbound clicks plug-in



Shaun Inman's Mint quickly rose to the top of our list of web stats tracking tools as it offers a powerful, customizable interface and a rich plug-in architecture that has quite a following. After launching Mint v2 back in January of this year, Inman has been releasing minor .x version updates to address the usual bugs and other quirks, but a new Mint v2.12 release brings some minor new features and one big new pepper (that's Mint-speak for 'plug-in'): the Outbound Pepper. As its name suggests, Inman's new pepper tracks outbound links from your site, helping you to see where exactly your visitors surf next.

Other changes in this new version include some updates to the display and handling of Mint's advanced preferences, as well as a new 'Ignore IPs' advanced preference to help you keep track of just the traffic you want. There is also a new 'Found' tab in the Searches pepper that lists pages at your site and the keywords used to find those pages.

As usual with Mint updates, this new version is available free to all registered users. You can find out a lot more about Mint from Haveamint.com, with a demo installation for your to tinker with before buying. Licenses for Mint cost a mere $30/domain.

[via Peppermint Tea]

Filed under: Design, Features, Blogging, Productivity, Social Software

A primer for WordPress themes, plug-ins and tips

WordPress is a powerful and very extensible blogging engine that is gaining more CMS (Content Management System) features with each release. As anyone who has downloaded a copy can probably tell, the directory structure is pretty friendly to hacks and plug-ins, but unless you are your own WordPress coding ninja, you might be asking yourself: where exactly can all these themes, plug-ins and hacks be found? Thus the idea for a short roundup of WordPress download sites and communities was born. Following is a starter list of sites for themes, plug-ins, tips and tricks of all kinds, ripe for helping you take your WordPress-powered site as far as you need to go. Since we're sure we haven't found every site for WordPress goodness, feel free to add your favorites in the comments and we'll update this post with the good ones.

Read more →

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Utilities, Video, E-mail, Web services, Yahoo!, VoIP, P2P

Yahoo Messenger is out of Beta

yahoo messengerThe new Yahoo! Messenger version 8 with voice has been brought out of beta to stir the pot with MSN Messenger, and Google Talk.

Besides being able to tie into MSN Messenger contacts, the new Yahoo messenger is loaded with plug-ins and cool new features from both internal developers, and users, by using Yahoo Messengers Plug-in SDK. Top plug-ins for Yahoo Messenger include one for Coupons.com, Newsgator RSS feeds, and one from Jeteye that lets you store and organize your online world. Nothing tops the new Movie Trailer plug-in that allows you to catch the latest movie trailers while IMing though.

It looks like there is a full on IM war out there. And Yahoo!, MSN, and Google are stuffing their messengers with new features like crazy.

[via cnet]

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

View more Time Wasters

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