I first started experimenting with Apture a few months back, and have since turned it off. While I loved it, it had a habit of chewing up memory on my server. To me it was a combination of ease-of-use, along with providing readers with quick links to rich content. Indeed, I would call it the most impressive plugin I have ever used in all the time I have blogged since 2002.
Rory O’Connor of HuffPo has gone a step further and called Apture Web 3.0. Says he:
Is Apture “a paradigm shift in publishing and online communication,” as Harris would have it? Decide for yourself – but there’s no doubt that it provides new tools to users that enhance their online experience, and allows bloggers such as yours truly to add true context to what I post. Sure, I could add the same content by copying and pasting code from, YouTube, but Apture makes it dead simple to add and share content on the Web. So what’s not to like?
If it wasn’t such a resource hog I would add it to all the blogs I host. As yet, I have not seen any other Irish bloggers try Apture, but I would encourage any bloggers out there to give it a go. Once you get the hang of inserting the extra content (wiki links, photos and videos), you will find yourself doing it to all of your posts.
Other plugins I have been playing with or plan to install are Open Calais by Thomson Reuters and Searchles.
Update: I’ve reactivated Apture for further testing. It is one of my favourite plugins, of all time. I must ask everyone if they like it too.
Comments
7 responses to “Apture for WordPress”
Hi Gavin,
Thanks for the post. Could you explain why you felt Apture was a resource-hog and chewing up server memory? I can’t imagine how that could happen since Apture isn’t server-side. In general, we spend a lot of time optimizing performance. Not only is it important, but our biggest publishing customers like the Washington Post, BBC, etc demand it without compromise.
We also made a change in early December making Apture several times faster to load and made it even faster to link new information. If you haven’t tried it in a while, it’s a game changing difference. Here’s the announcement: http://blog.apture.com/2008/12/now-faster-than-ever/
We’d love to hear more of your feedback about performance.. could you email us at feedback AT apture DOT com? And hope you continue to enjoy using the product!
Thanks,
Tristan, CEO Apture
I’m gonna go testing it again Tristan. Deactivting apture coincided with a reduced load on my memory… can’t find another explanation.
Cool Gavin, let me know how it goes. And could you let me know – when you say a reduced load on your memory – which do you mean? What system is telling you that its taking up more memory?
Thanks!
Tristan
Yea, I was having issues with RAM usage a while back. Turning off apture appeared to stop this issue, though reactivating doesn’t seem to have brought the issue back. I am stumped. I will keep Apture active until I see any reason to change!
Gavin, I agree, Apture looks and feels impressive. If they’d let me, I’d install it on my WordPress.com blog. As it is, I’m nearly ready to switch to WordPress.org so I can use it. I’m not so impressed with ‘snap shots’, which seems to have more limited linking capacity. We definitely need a smarter kind of hyperlink.
What makes Apture a ‘killer app’, for me, is this: multiple simultaneous linking. Hyperlinks are the thing that makes web a conceptual step up from print. But when they were invented it was assumed a word (or image) would only link to one idea. As a school kid I was taken with studying poetry and finding that a six word line of a T.S. Eliot poem would contain allusions to eight or more other texts – i.e. more links than words. It seems as though Apture is well on the way to fixing this inadequacy in the existing web, and so providing another conceptual leap. Further, it now appears intuitive that a hyperlink could be, without prejudice, to text, video, audio, image…
As the web develops it seems increasingly clear that the hyperlink itself is the content, and I think Apture is showing a way forward.
I have been using apture for a few weeks now and haven’t noticed any issues. I have always thought of load as being similar as iframes on both client side and the server from where the information within the window comes but I could be very wrong.
I don’t get the resource hog thing either. I just came across this plugin and think its the best thing since blogging. I just wich you could use it when creating or editing blogger post.