Marko Samastur's dashboard

I regret to say this, but we have never supported picking size of inserted images on services that provide more than one. We do try to pick one that is a good compromise between size in pixels and size in bytes.

If that image is too big (in pixels), then you can resize it by clicking on it and dragging one of square points that show up. I hope this is good enough for now, although I can well imagine it isn't ideal.

First let me sincerely apologize for not responding to your question sooner.

Is this still a problem? If yes, then could you please tell me if anything changed in your browser since when Zemanta worked (like new extensions or updated versions of already installed ones).

Completely my fault for not describing it well. Drag and drop works only in rich text editors, so if you switch from "Edit HTML" to "Compose" and try there, then it should work.

You can always switch back if you prefer using simple editor.

We haven't implemented dragging in simple editors because of technical limitations that we haven't been able to overcome just yet.

Thank you. Please let us know if you'll need any help.

Turning Zemanta off does not cause a change because that image is stored in your post on your server. If you want to remove it from your old posts, then you will have to do this yourself.

We are sorry we can't make this more pleasant, but we have access to your post only when its opened in your editor and can't do anything with it otherwise.

What you can do to avoid this problem in the future, is open preferences at the bottom right of our widget and when a window with preferences opens, select a transparent image and save preferences. – Marko Samastur, on August 08, 2009 16:29

If you are using browser Firefox or Internet Explorer, then you likely already can.

Just try clicking on an image in gallery, drag it to where you want it to be in your post and release mouse button. You should get an image there and you can repeat this as many times as you want.

Please let us know if it works for you. – Marko Samastur, on August 08, 2009 16:23

Not yet.

We support adding Flash widget with stock performance from Wikinvest for stock symbols found in test and our database. This works only on platforms that allow us to add flash widgets to blog post.

Newly launched balloons don't have this functionality yet, but we hope to add it in the future.

Removing width:310px from style attribute on DIV elements with zemanta-img class should do the trick.

If you switch to HTML editor, then you should find this element at the top of your post. – Marko Samastur, on August 04, 2009 13:26

Thank you for letting us know about what seems a problem in our code. Problem comes because wrapping elements has a set width (in this case 310px). If it's removed, then alignment works fine.

We are trying to understand where that width setting came, so could you please tell us if you changed size of the image?

Most likely you can. Try dragging an image from gallery to where you want to have it in post. You can do this for as many images as you like.

This should work in most cases, but please let us know what blogging platform and browser you are using in case it doesn't.

I answered this question where it was first posed:
http://getsatisfaction.com/zemanta/to...

I'm sorry but which login are you talking about? The one that is on the right side of preferences pop-up triggered from our editing widget or the one that this site, Get satisfaction, requires for commenting about anything?

If you mean this one, then we are sorry that we can't do anything since getsatisfaction.com doesn't belong to our company and hence we can not and do not control its registration or login policies.

If you are talking about the one in preferences, then Jure is right. Zemanta doesn't require login there for functioning and the only thing registering does is to allow you to save and use your preferences permanently across browsers.

They are different and require separate registrations.

We certainly neither force or expect you to write anything for us, but you are more than welcome to share your opinion with anyone.

I am sorry that our tool is a source of aggravation instead of joy for you and I wish you best of luck with tools that might better fulfill your needs.

Please let me know if you need help with uninstalling Zemanta widget or plugin.

Hi Kent,

We published a bunch of fixes today which we hope should fix your problem as well. Could you please check and let me know if they do?

We shouldn't break videos anymore and we should only replace those shortcodes that were inserted by our widget.

Thank you. Obviously there's more wrong with our code than we knew.

We'll try to fix this as soon as possible and most certainly before end of this month.

Can you be more specific what doesn't work?

What should happen, if everything worked correctly, is following:
1. When inserting youtube video from our gallery, it should insert its image representation. This image can be resized and its size will determine the size of inserted video.
2. If link was inserted as [youtube=...] then we should leave it alone while editing.
3. When post gets saved or published, ALL videos get changed to their [youtube=...] representation.
4. If video is further edited or you go and re-edit an older post that includes a youtube video, then ALL included videos will have their [youtube=...] representation replaced with their thumbnail (that can be resized...). When we do this, we try to read video's dimensions, size its thumbnail accordingly and make sure it doesn't get lost on any later republish or save.
5. If that post gets republished or saved again, then step 3. should happen.

So if everything is working as intended, it should never break anything and videos in post should always be saved as [youtube=...] links. If that isn't happening, then there must be a bug.

Of course even if above steps are happening, it isn't what you want. It is our understanding that most users of Zemanta prefer to work with image representations, but it is also true you are not alone who doesn't.

You are right that we are touching parts that weren't inserted by us and that is at least inappropriate if not completely wrong.

Ideally we would love to distinguish between our links and others, but that is difficult because through time a post might produce a different set of suggestions (we gather new information all the time and what used to be the best pick might not be best in week's time). Hence when we encounter a youtube link, we don't have a way to tell if its ours or not.

One options that was considered was adding additional HTML wrapper around our links, so we could tell them apart, but we decided not to do this because we have been previously, in my opinion justifiably, berated for inserting too much HTML code.

So here we are now in situation, where every options upsets a group of our users and no group is wrong. It is a problem that should be limited to wordpress.com, since standalone WP installations are a bit more flexible (again, if this isn't true, then it is a bug).

All I can currently do is ask you for a bit more patience while we try to find a solution that would satisfy everyone. I can assure you that this is high on our list of tasks to do.

Since I implemented this, I should also probably explain what is happening and why. Jure wasn't avoiding explanation, but he probably can't describe it in every detail.

We recently started suggesting YouTube videos that are listed in gallery part of the widget. We wanted videos to work as everything else does in our widget, which among other things mean that if you try to re-edit a post, that it will recognize our media and you'll be able to work with it as otherwise, which means easily remove by clicking on it in gallery, drag something else over it or resize it.

The problem happens on WP.com, where YouTube videos are added as [youtube=<link />]. What we do with our media items is to replace them on save/publish with such a link.

I think it is quite obvious that it is difficult to distinguish between links that were ours and those that you added on your own.

Hence we were left with a decision to either leave all of them as custom links and break what we think our users expect of us or handle other links as well.

Our guess was that later was better, but it obviously isn't what you want for which I am truly sorry. If you can think of a better solution, we would be happy to consider it. We are thinking about it too, but so far we haven't come up with a better plan.