It has been a busy week. We had a new release at Zemanta , first big one that I was a part of. While things didn’t go as smoothly as we would hope, I think it has been a big success. I would like to thank all involved for their huge contribution and especially to my team, which never stops astonishing me. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to work with you all.

We also made a small blunder with cursor moving while typing your post. Emptying your browser cache should remedy this. Please let me know if it doesn’t. Even though we are still in alpha, we don’t see this as an excuse for poor performance.

It has been a release full of features, but two of them are especially dear to me even though I haven’t contributed much to either.

clean HTML

We heard numerous, quite correct complaints that HTML we insert in posts is not valid or nice enough. We did this partly because of honest mistakes on our part (e.g. putting IDs on elements that can appear more than once per page) or because it is really difficult to insert an HTML fragment that will look OK everywhere, no matter the blogging platform or visual template used.

At the end we came to conclusion that it is not feasible for us to do this, so we now offer you a choice. If you do nothing, you will still get the same styled HTML for related articles. But if you chose a clean xHTML option in preferences, which can be find below articles list, you will get a clean, unstyled xHTML which you can style to your liking. We still haven’t settled on final HTML for it, so any feedback would be more than welcome.

Reblog

The other feature I am really fond of is reblog . Using Zemanta added a little orange image at the end of the post. It was basically a small ad for us, which we really appreciated. This ad has been replaced with new image that offers your visitors an easy way to continue discussion on their blogs by choosing a paragraph from your story to quote and adding their thoughts before publishing it.

You can see an example on this very post. Just press reblog button at the end. We are continuously discovering and fixing quirks in parsing HTML text out there, but if you find a new one, please let us know.

So these were my favorite features. What were yours?