Z-Blog

One of the questions we got asked often is – “how can I make Zemanta more personal” and “is there anything I can configure to make it better tailored for my blogging style“?

The answer is – yes, you can! A lot of changes and updates in last year were done with different types of bloggers in mind and we’ve made sure that you can customize the experience to your liking.

1. Lets start with accessing the Preferences, where you configure the whole Zemanta experience:

Clicking on Preferences link that will open a new window that gives you – well, preferences. This works the same for all flavors of Zemanta (plugins, extensions, etc.)

2. Login / register in Preferences

To access most of the options, you need to be logged in into Zemanta. If you haven’t registered with Preferences before you’ll need to do that now. Do note that you will not be able to login with your blog username and password but you need to register once again for Zemanta.

3. Three levels of settings in Zemanta: Layout, Personal and My Stuff. We’ll go through each one in more detail

4. Layout – set the way Zemanta integrates into your blog design and the features that we append to it.

• Image position – here you can set the way we align the images by default
• HTML Code Style is a specific setting for bloggers that would like more control over their HTML so Zemanta doesn’t insert so many compatibility tags and styles. Use this if you know your XHTML and CSS kung-fu.
• Semantic tagging - this is part of our recently announced CommonTag standard.
• Readers’ features – allows you to add extra JavaScript to your blog posts that make a better reader experience, like pretty image attribution or more related articles.
• Signature Image – decide on the style of your ReBlog button or even turn it off.

5. Personal

• About you – here you can set your blog and if you want to receive our monthly newsletter and release notes. Adding your blog will allow us to start aggregating it and recommending you your old content.
• Affiliate is very interesting as it allows you to make money by blogging with Zemanta and adding your own Amazon affiliate.

6. My Stuff

This is the biggest part of personalization as you can link your social network accounts and tell Zemanta to aggregate from these sources.

• Images – right now we can recommend you images from Flickr. The only limitations is that you have to reasonably tag them or use manual search to locate them, if we don’t automatically understand your tags.
• Friends and other content – tell us who are your friends on different social networks and we’ll recommend links to their pages and profiles if mention them in your blog posts or emails. We can also recommend you articles from their blogs.

7. Continue writing

After you customized Zemanta, there is nothing else to do in Preferences. Close the preferences and continue blogging and writing emails. Zemanta will automatically take all your new settings into account and provide you with more personally tailored recommendations.