Blogging coolness

I'm writing this in Firefox as a test of the Zemanta plug-in I installed a few days ago. Zemanta takes your plain old blog post and recommends images, links, and tags/labels for inclusion in the post.

It took me a minute to figure out how to it works. It loads straightforwardly and it looks simple enough to operate, but the recommendations weren't changing. I finally realized that you have to click the Update link to get the plug-in to reassess its advice. Maybe there's a timer involved, but I'm too impatient to recognize that if it's there. Oh, wait - there it goes. Yeah, there's a timer.

You can choose to apply all recommended links, or any subset of them by clicking once per recommendation. I did that for "timer" at the end of the last paragraph. When you add a link with the Zemanta interface, the plug-in also appends the code to make that button at the bottom of this post.

That's easily deleted if you don't want it. I don't use tags, and if I want a link, I usually already have it in mind, so for me the test of Zemanta's utility is the image recommendations, and this post isn't a good test for that. I'll watch it for a week or two and report back.

Bonus funny:

NASA has installed a water recycling system in the International Space Station. In testing now, it will recycle all waste water, including and especially the astronauts' sweat and urine. It's the Stillsuit Mk I. (Hmmm, no Zemanta recommendations for "stillsuit".)

I found some footage of early testing of ground-based prototypes on YouTube. Take a look.