Browser Bookmarklets for Giving Credit

I’ve been thinking more lately about giving credit on my own website, particularly in cases where the context of things I’m reading has some additional context based on where I originally saw them. I’d also like to give people I follow credit as the source by which my own content is aggregated.

Earlier today I tinkered around with some ideas relating to the old Curator’s Code which I revisit from time to time. I outlined some details, data fields, UI, and some pseudo-code to actually build it into a WordPress plugin. Then I thought I ought to check the repository where I discovered that someone had previously made one. Unfortunately it was withdrawn from the repository. I suspect its that they didn’t want to continue to support it moving into the Gutenberg era. (It still works with the classic editor.)

I don’t give credit on my site often enough in large part because it isn’t an easier thing to do when quickly posting some of the smaller bits of content. They say “manual until it hurts“, and doing this has just hurt too much for too long. Toward that end I thought I’d make a couple of quick bookmarklets for cutting and pasting text into my site. It’s not as good as a better custom UI, but it’ll work and could potentially work well for others.

These bookmarklets aren’t any great shakes and perhaps (hopefully?) someone with more JavaScript chops than I have can greatly improve upon them to add or modify some of the bits and automate things a bit better. In particular, I’m sure there’s a way to find the original publication date on a page and pull that data out, but currently I could only figure out how to find the last modified date using document.lastModified because I couldn’t find the other. I’d also prefer to have a way to automatically find the author(s) as well, but JS isn’t my best friend.

Instructions for use

Create two bookmarks in your browser’s bookmark bar. Give them convenient names like “via” and “hat tip” and add the snippets of code respectively into the URL fields. On a site you want to give credit to, highlight the name of the author of the post and click the bookmarklet. You’ll see a pop up for some text which you can then cut and paste into your post to give the credit. You can obviously edit the text if necessary.

If your site supports sending Webmention notifications, then when the post is published, the cited page will get a notification of your post.

Bookmarklet code

Below are snippets of code that the bookmarklets are running (for transparency’s sake).

javascript:(function(){let text=""; if(window.getSelection()!=''){text=window.getSelection().toString()+"\n";}prompt("Press Ctrl+C, Escape"," ᔥ "+text+" in "+document.title+" ( "+document.lastModified+" ) ");})()

javascript:(function(){let text=""; if(window.getSelection()!=''){text=window.getSelection().toString()+"\n";}prompt("Press Ctrl+C, Escape"," ↬ "+text+" in "+document.title+" ( "+document.lastModified+" ) ");})()

Example

Here’s an example of what it looks like on my site:

↬ Maria Popova with input from Tina Roth Eisenberg in curator’s ǝpoɔ (2018-12-07 21:32:53)

Who will you credit?