Zemanta Related Posts Plugin — It’s Alive!

Image via CrunchBase

I felt bereft about the sudden removal of the Zemanta related content (images/text) plugin from WordPress on January 2, 2014. Hunting for (and crediting) images took 20 minutes (compared to a minute before with this handy little tool). Appending Related Articles to blogposts — now that was completely impossible.

I was quite inconsolable (almost as if I had lost a beloved pet). After extensive poking around in the WordPress forums, I discovered that Zemanta still does exist, albeit in an “independent” incarnation. It is alive! (but not in some gory, piteable, and horribly stitched way as Dr. Frankenstein’s creation was). The interface is a familiar one, if slightly visually enhanced. You just have to sign up for it here and then sign in. The next time you open or create a new blogpost, the Zemanta module should pop up on the right (assuming you have used or turned on the Zemanta plugin in the past in your WordPress blogs).

On a similar topic of crediting content, I discovered a neat little utility a few days ago called Jeffrey’s Exif viewer, which reads the EXIF meta data of an image (or image URL) to show, among other things, whether the image is copyrighted or not. While it won’t be 100% foolproof/accurate, as some images may be being stripped of their EXIF meta data upon upload to WordPress, it helps to give me quite a bit of peace of mind about the authorship of the image in question (kudos to those of you who have properly “EXIF”ed and copyrighted your images).