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. As I blogged about back in 2016 about fake news, I don’t think retweets are helpful. Markdown block quotes are easy enough, 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 embedding features 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:
iA Writer has added Micropub support in today’s 5.5 update:
This means you can publish to Micro.blog and other IndieWeb tools.
Another test:
@chaitanya Thanks. @manton suggested I use this method put forward by @chet (which seems slightly easier!). I will see how it goes with the next podcast RSS refresh.
I’ve kept this 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.
