How to add life and fun to your blog posts

I came across this great tool Zemanta via a post on Twitter and is also featured on TechCrunch. It allows you to find contextually relevant links, pictures, related content and tags from the net that you can add to a Wordpress blog post you are writing with one click. Zemanta uses an internally developed semantic analysis engine and will only suggest Creative Commons content so there are no issues with legality of using the content on your site.

Currently it is works with Firefox and TypePad, self hosted Wordpress, wordpress.com and Blogger blogs although they are looking at adding Movable type and also LiveWriter to the mix.

I have been testing it on some of my blogs and so far it has been great for adding some color to my posts with image suggestions and also the automatic tagging is my favorite feature of this. You can download Zemanta for free now. It was a winning startup idea at Seedcamp and has just raised more funding this year so I am looking forward to seeing what other great functions they come up with. This has made blogging much more fun.

Turning off no follow on comments with Linky Love plugin

I was reading Tinu’s traffic tips blog and saw that she was using this plugin on her blog posts. It is called Linky Love and it lets you automatically follow the links in comments after the person has made a minimum number of comments. This will prevent human spammers and also comment spammers who put in SEO names like “cashmere dog sweaters”. Quite an interesting concept. I will give it a trial once I work out how to fix the settings. Well worth trying out and it is nice to be able to give some link love to those real readers of your blog.