I’ve made a little script to automate a regular and tedious aspect of blogging — the hand-coding of a web link followed by a selected quote.
To use my script you highlight/select the quote you want to blog, then right-click on your desired quote. The script does all the linking and coding for you, and outputs a link/quote to your clipboard in the following manner:—
D’log :: blogging since 2000 » Trees will have their own blogs wrote…
“Maybe that’s what LOLcat is for, in the long-view — to give us a form of language that will differentiate human from non-human on the web?”
As you can see, it grabs the title from the page title, and it retains working links inside the quote. The basic format is:
Page link + Page title / wrote… / blockquote / “your quote” wrapped in html quote marks / close blockquote
Installation:
To install it, first install the Firefox addon ContextMenu Extensions for Firefox. Then restart Firefox in the usual way.
Then to install the script in Firefox go to: Tools / Addons / ContextMenu Extensions / Options / Custom Scripts / New Items. There you can create a new right-click menu item. Title it “Auto Blog”. A blank code window will appear. Into this code window paste the Auto Blog script (.txt file). Press Apply / OK, then exit the ContextMenu options panel, and also exit the Firefox Addons list.
Use:
The script should work straight away. Highlight a quote, then right-click on it. On your browser’s right-click menu you’ll have…
![auto-blog-script-for-ff](https://jurn.link/jurnsearch/2009/12/auto-blog-script-for-ff1.gif)
I also made a slightly different scholarly version, for use with long-form essay-style posts on academic blogs — when you perhaps want to do some basic referencing but don’t want to get all strict and Harvard about it. “Auto Essay Quote” (.txt file) which, on highlighting and copying, returns a quote/link/date to the clipboard thus…
“My argument here is that the major works of Moore’s career actively pursue the articulation of an historiographic vision, one that is roughly similar to the narrative Moore describes in the interview above, but that in his actual artistic output is a great deal more complex and ambivalent. While Moore in interviews describes history as an unstoppable progressive tide, as inevitably bound to redeem us and improve our lives, in his comic book writing he is concerned with how history is made by human beings, with how history happens.”
[ Source: The Tides of History: Alan Moore’s Historiographic Vision – accessed on 9th December 2009 ]
There’s no way for the script to grab author names unless they’re in the page title. Your milage may vary, in terms of how well a large quote line-wraps when it’s pasted into your blogging software. But both flaws are trivial matters to correct.
(Related on Jurn: OCR from Google Books pages)