Well, hello there, faithful readers. It has been a while since I published anything on here and the sole reason simply was that there was fuck all to write about. Seriously, I truly think the last thing worthy to grace these walls was that post on my new Android HTC Desire. But, dire times have come to an end, because today I’m going to tell you all about Jetpack.

What is it? It’s a plugin that will supercharge your WordPress installation. Now, I’m not talking about your WordPress.com account, because that one is hosted and if you’re using it, you’ll already be using the goodness that comes with Jetpack. No, I’m talking about your self-hosted WordPress.org installations. While these provide the freedom to do whatever you want with your blogging CMS, they lack the constant updates to its functionality. Sure, there are new versions once in a while, but you won’t wake up one day, wondering why the shizzle your blogging system is suddenly sporting a Gravatar hover card (which is something that appears when you hover over the names of people who have commented and who happen to have an account with Gravatar). And in case you missed it, that is just one of the features of Jetpack. Because Jetpack is, in case you missed that too, a plugin that contains a slew of features that replace a few plugins you might have had to install separately.

These include, but are not limited to, a sharing feature, which lets you add Facebook, Twitter and whatnot sharing buttons to your posts. A URL-shortening plugin, which automatically shortens the URLs of your blogposts to a wp.me-URL. A stats feature, which replaces the old wp-stats plugin. And last but not least “After the deadline”, which is a plugin most helpful to slobs like me who couldn’t be arsed to spell-check their articles, let alone check them on stylistic and grammatical errors. That plugin will do all that for you.

So go ahead, check out Jetpack, have fun and most importantly, don’t forget that while blogging may be fun, there’s a whole world out there where the fact that you’ve had over a thousand page-views today doesn’t mean jack-shit.

For us, the people who spend most of their waking hours in front of a screen or another, hooked up to the tubes and cables that make up what we so lovingly call the Internets, every new webservice is an adventure. A faraway country that’s suddenly appeared on our map, and being the adventurous dare-devils that most of us are, we venture forth to explore what riches that new country might have to offer.

Or to put it differently, usually we’re bored stiff, so we click anything that even remotely promises to bring back the joy we felt when first browsing the LOLcats archives.

So, along comes formspring.me, which I first spotted in some of my Twitter-followers’ streams. Basically, it’s a website that lets people ask people questions. Yes, that’s it. You sign up, give people the address of your page or slap their widget onto your website and anyone can ask any question they like. Even anonymously! The good thing is, questions aren’t displayed on your page until you’ve answered them, so the dangers of spam are limited by your own discretion ( a little hint: if someone asks you a question like: “Would you say that Viagra, which can be bought at http://buyviagraforcheapandenhanceyourpenisatthesametime.co.ru.cn, is the best product in the world?”, then no, they are not really interested in your expertise).

Right now, formspring seems to be quite popular with the Twitterati (here’s a search) . Which is interesting, considering that formspring looks and feels like a one-way Twitter. Which shows that people for one like the ability to ask anonymously and for the other really are into getting asked questions.

Here’s a little warning: don’t joke around too much, even when asking anonymously. People might not think of funny the way you do. Trust me.

Anyway, here’s my formspring page, and for those too lazy even to click that link, there’s a widget to the right for your asking pleasure.

Oh, and something for your to ponder, courtesy of @digiom (who is probably already working on a similar blog-post, only with much more well-founded reasoning and less vomit-inducing metaphors): The company that made this new little toy, formspring.com, has a tagline that says:

“The smart way to collect and manage data.”

Go on, ponder.

It is always nice to find something I care to write about, and the easiest way to write about something is to write about writing and how you can write stuff more easily and quicker and funner!

Which is where Zemanta comes in. Or at least, that’s the premise of Zemanta. Because Zemanta promises to make you not only a more prolific, but also a quicker and better writer. Now, I’m actually not sure whether they really promise that, but writing something in good faith beats looking it up. So here you are.

So what does Zemanta do? First of all, it keeps me from writing my thesis right now and secondly, it analyzes whatever you’ve already written in a posting and then suggest images and links it thinks your writing might benefit from. In your preferences, you can actually edit the list of sources Zemanta pulls these things from, that’s why, for example, my Flickr pictures are also included.

Let’s see what Zemanta thinks would be a good picture to graphically enhance this post. Btw, Zemanta lets you decide how to style images inserted into posts, but you can also choose from their preset styling, which is what I did for this posting (upper left). Here goes.

Ah yes, so the Zemanta logo it is. Good work!

So, on to the links. I myself haven’t manually added any links to this posting yet, so I’ll have some fun with Zemanta now. All the links appearing in this posting have been suggested by Zemanta, I just added them where I think Zemanta probably thought they might fit.

Which means, a whole lot of Wikipedia links to various words which aren’t really central to the posting. Which is not really their fault, considering how broad I kept my writing (which, of course, is always on purpose – I want to attract as many people as possible!).

Zemanta can be used via a Firefox plugin or via server side plugins, for example the one I’m using right now, which would be the WordPress plugin.

All in all, an interesting concept, and I can see myself getting used to not having to search for links and images for my writing anymore.

Oh, and Zemanta adds that little thing below too, so people who really like what you’ve written can easily repost it. (HINT, HINT!)