Entropy

Image from Wikipedia

Every time I upgrade my Firefox 3 beta all my plugins stop working, and I’m almost always certain that there is no real reason aside from the version shift - there are no relevant changes etc.

The most critical of these is my new favourite blogging tool, Zemanta. As I’m sure you’ve noticed there have been no posts for 2 days because of this

So here’s how to force plugins to work on new versions.

Step 1: Nightly Tester Tools

Nightly Tester Tools is a plugin for Firefox (that will install) which allows you to do a few nifty things, one of which is force plugins to be compatible. Go download it now!

Step 2: Restart Firefox

This is a step on its own because it can be tricky. After installing Nightly Tester tools I had to use the Tools->Addons menu and tell it to update it and restart again to get it working. But, worry not, it is possible to use this on beta5. Do whatever it takes people.

Step 3: Use the Tool

Once you’ve got your nightly tester tools installed (you can tell as your titlebar will include a Build number), its time to enable Zemanta (or your other plugin).

Go into Tools -> Add-ons and select the extensions menu. Right click on Zemanta and choose to “Make Compatible“. Now restart Firefox; when you come back you’ll notice your Zemanta is running once again!

Step 4: Other Apps (Optional)

Note that you can do this for any plugin - be careful though because there are changes between versions. I can tell you that Zemanta runs fine on beta5; but other plugins might not - although to be honest its very unlikely in my opinion when we’re almost RC.

Zemanta is (currently) a Firefox plugin which throws your blogging into overdrive - it automatically suggests and inserts images, links, related links and tags into your blog posts in (currently) WordPress (even 2.5), Blogger and TypePad. Oh, and we love it.

Functionality

Zemanta works exactly how you’d want it - without any changes to your blog, no extra plugins, no settings - it inserts itself in the page and automatically gets suggestions.

After every 300 characters (or when you click it) Zemanta goes off and does its thing, finding images suitable for your content (from Flickr, Wikipedia etc) and related articles for you to insert. As I’ve said, this is all content based and works very well - have a peruse around the latest posts on the site to see some examples.

Once it has a set of data, you can click an image to have it automatically inserted into your post (formatting included), links to have the text in your page its discovered sent to their homepages (very snazzy) and articles to fill in a nicely formatted related articles page.

Functionality Gallery

Support

The Zemanta support staff and systems are both great. I recently queried (on their blog) WordPress 2.5 support and within hours there were comments here, on Entropy, explaining that it should work shortly. Zemanta automatically updated itself and my WordPress 2.5 began to work later that night!

See for yourself: The Post and Zemanta’s Blog.

Coming Soon

As if the functionality thats currently there wasn’t enough; Zemanta has also published a list of features that are coming soon! Correction: these are feature requests (which we hope will come soon

• Browsing through images and articles.
• LiveWriter plugin (this was massive)
• Zemanta logo at the bottom of posts being optional
• More links to different sites (apart from Wikipedia)
• Ability to prefer your old posts and blogs from the blogroll
• Spanish, German, Swedish, Chinese, Arabic, Hindii and other languages support
• Cleaner and nicer HTML we insert

We’re officially rolling WordPress 2.5 now folks; so far the only down side is that my Zemanta has stopped displaying (it obviously doesn’t roll 2.5) and I’ve just discovered the rich text editors link popup is broken . See more on the release at these blogs –

• Dougal
• Photomatt
• westi on WP
• WordPress Blog
• Lorelle
• Weblog Tools Collection