For a long time I’ve wanted to add quoting tools to Micro.blog, so that it’s even easier to embed text from other blog posts and add your own thoughts. Markdown block quotes are fairly easy, but do require a little more copy/paste work and some editing.
So I was really interested in the recent launch of Quotebacks, from Tom Critchlow and Toby Shorin. We’ve needed a kind of “embed microblog post” feature in Micro.blog, similar to the embedding that Twitter and Facebook have. Quotebacks are exactly that, but they work for anything on the web.
I’d like to run with Quotebacks and see where it leads us. For now, I’ve added “Embed” links on the Micro.blog Favorites page on the web. This is an experiment. It will likely change, either rolling out in some form to all the platforms, or based on feedback maybe we’ll go in a different direction.
I’ve also forked the Quotebacks repository and tweaked the JavaScript with a couple changes:
- Instead of routing the favicons through Google’s cache, Micro.blog’s version just uses the profile photos on your account directly with a new
data-avatarattribute. - Because copied microblog posts always have a profile photo, it is displayed larger with rounded corners.
How does this look? I’m embedding a microblog post below using this feature:
We’ve posted Core Int 424, talking with @danielpunkass about the ARM rumor, how it compares to previous transitions, WWDC, and more.
I’ve kept the “Embed” links isolated to the Favorites page so we can try a few things without disrupting the rest of your Micro.blog workflow. There are other questions to answer, such as how this should integrate with sending Webmentions, but I think having something like this to play with is a good first step.
