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 discussion 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.