The answer to my question: WordPress “Press It” feature

I asked, not too long ago, if anyone had suggestions on sharing stuff from google reader in a nice way into WordPress. No-one answered and I didn’t find any solutions myself.

However, I did come across this plugin for WordPress: Quick Post. It didn’t install properly when I tried it, but I played with it and bit and got it to work. What it does is add a little “Bookmarklet” (works in Chrome and Firefox at least) which you can click on when you’re on a webpage and it’ll pop up a window with some details of the page you’re on already embedded in the post. What is nice about it, is that you can select a portion of the page, click the bookmarklet, and it’ll pop up a post with that text in it. It can also embed videos and images.

How does this solve my problem? I can’t get Google Reader to automatically create a draft post. But that’s not a big deal. I don’t want to be sharing loads of stuff here, so doing a little bit of manual work is fine. I just go to the link, select a summary or an image and I can use Quick Post to generate an entry. I’ll have to copy over my comment, but that’s fine. It forces me to write a blog post instead of just dumping a link compared to say doing it on Facebook or Twitter.

I did some digging, planning on forwarding my fixes to the author, and found that it is no longer supported! Not only that, it’s already supported in WordPress 2.6 (the latest version is 2.9). It seems if you go under the Tools menu, you’ll find a link called “Press It”, which you can drag to your Browser’s bookmarks. This little bookmarklet does something similar to Quick Post. Go to a webpage, select the text from the page, click the bookmarklet and you get a simple post screen with the link and title plus your summary. It’s pretty funky.

My one complaint is that if you want to use an image from a website, it only allows you to use the URL as the image (i.e. hotlinking). It doesn’t automatically download the image, which would make it the ultimate solution.

So there you go, that’s my wordpress tip for the month. Now you shouldn’t have any excuse for automated regurgitated content. :)

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