Introducing: Quotebacks

Networked writing (aka blogging) has become increasingly important as a part of my identity. It’s the framework for creating lifelong friendships, finding rewarding client work and experimenting with ideas as a personal creative outlet.

So, Toby Shorin and I have created a small tool called Quotebacks. The ultimate goal is to encourage and activate a deeper cross-blogger discusson space. To promote diverse voices and encourage networked writing to flourish.

But, while that’s a lofty goal the tool is small and simple. Quotebacks is three things:

1. A web-native citation standard and quoting UX pattern
2. A tiny library, quoteback.js, that converts HTML <blockquote> tags into elegant interactive webcomponents
3. A browser extension to create quoteback components and store any quotes you save to publish later.

Saving a quote from the web looks like this:

And your quote library looks like this (saved in chrome storage):

And this is a quoteback embedded on my blog:

Note how the quote becomes nicely styled - but also preserves the context of where I found it in a predictable way.

Install Quotebacks in the chrome store here or find out more at quotebacks.net.

And by the way Quotebacks can be useful even if you’re not a blogger - quotes can be exported as images (for e.g. substack) and markdown (for e.g. Roam)

Why Quotebacks

I publish this site using Jekyll - a static site templating language. That’s important because it’s very extensible - there’s no database so everything becomes text files that I can open, manipulate and tinker with. As the web increasingly gets dominated by the large platforms we see a retreat from software (and web pages) that you can tinker withHave you tried view source on Twitter or Facebook recently? .

So - while Toby and I are not professional developers - it’s rewarding to build something that we want to use ourselves and release it back into the community. As Mandy Brown says:

This is our first public release so I’m sure there will be bugs. Hopefully we’ll squash them together.

Thank you to early beta testers. In particular Sonya Mann & CJ Eller.

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Glen Allsopp

1 point

6 months ago

Would be cool if it had the ability to show how many times someone has quoted specific text (especially if it takes off).

Similar to Medium. It could be huge in that sense.

E.g. the website could show 'most quoted' etc. :)

Tom Critchlow

1 point

6 months ago

Yes - that would be great but would require building a centralized server architecture that we're not ready for yet....

Thanks for the comment tho!

Jim Meredith

1 point

5 months ago

I love the idea but just can't get it to work. I am using the Vivaldi browser (a chrome browser) and has remapped my shortcuts to command-shift-S, but nothing happens. Any guidance here?

D

David Blue

0 points

4 months ago

Just wanted to second this - I was unable to get the extension to respond to the shortcut in Vivaldi, but I was able to get the shortcut to work on Edge Chromium.

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Anonymous

0 points

6 months ago

Any chance to have a Firefox extension?

Tom Critchlow

0 points

6 months ago

We're working on it! Should be available soon

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Anonymous

0 points

6 months ago

great extension. don't forget to upload to addons.mozilla.org aswell. firefox is the last hope for people not wanting a monopoly of the big platforms.

meta: you should set a background color, or ensure nothing, even this comment widget, sets foreground ones. cheers!

˗ˏˋ𝕊𝕒𝕚𝕛𝕠 𝔾𝕖𝕠𝕣𝕘𝕖ˎˊ˗

0 points

6 months ago

This is seriously awesome, you could probably look at https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment to deep-link to the quoted text on Chromium based browsers

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Anonymous

0 points

6 months ago

This is very cool! Would it be useful to have the quote jump to were it came from on the page? Or maybe highlighted. Just for ease of remembering/context. xman

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Steve

0 points

6 months ago

A Safari extension would be excellent too!

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