Since I only had 13 highlight posts versus 121 annotation posts (plus various additional annotations and highlights which I’ve rolled up into the body of some of my read posts) over the last year and a half, I felt it seemed redundant and bothersome to maintain two separate, but nearly identical post kinds. Semantically one may think of a highlight on some text as an annotation anyway, thus the idea of annotation subsumes that of a simple highlight.
As of this evening, I’ve changed all the custom highlight posts to be of the annotation kind. Other than the one word visual difference of the post kind text changing from “highlight” to “annotation” this change won’t affect much except for those who may have been subscribed to the highlight feed. Going forward you may consider subscribing to my annotation feed instead.
I had created highlight posts first, but in the end annotation posts have won the day. And for those that don’t have them, fear not, because honestly annotation posts are really just glorified bookmarks with custom text in the context. (The glorification only entails a highligher icon instead of a bookmark icon and a bit of CSS to color the text yellow.) I do find having them delineated for my personal research purposes useful though.
Chris, thank you for this explanation regarding your thoughts on annotation versus highlight post kinds. I have used your helpful example to post my Hypothes.is highlights and annotations on my WordPress site. But I am unable to find any annotation or highlight post kinds using the most recent published version (3.3.3) of the Post Kinds plugin. Did you have to manually add your own kinds to accomplish this?
Yes, there’s a way to manually add your own kinds if you like. I’ve described the process in Manually adding a new post kind to the Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress, but the plugin has changed a bit to make doing this a bit easier and more flexible. I hope to document the details shortly, though there may be some documentation in the Github repo for the plugin.