Katharina Brunner

Blogging

Old School Blogging

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Matthias findet, ich sollte wieder mehr bloggen. Ich finde, er hat recht.

Zum Thema schreibt Ezra Klein bei Vox:

But blogging, for better or worse, is proving resistant to scale. And I think there are two reasons why.

The first is that, at this moment in the media, scale means social traffic. Links from other bloggers — the original currency of the blogosphere, and the one that drove its collaborative, conversational nature — just don’t deliver the numbers that Facebook does.

(…)

The other reason is that the bigger the site gets, and the bigger the business gets, the harder it is to retain the original voice.

Nun beide Gründe haben mit meinem Blog eigentlich nichts zu tun, Skalierung lag nun wirklich nie in meinem Interesse. Doch, auch mich befällt gelegentlich die „nostalgia for old-school blogging“, wie Klein es bezeichnet. Ob dem auf wirklich regelmäßig Blogposts folgen, sei dahingestellt: Am Montag beginnt meine erste Festanstellung.

URL Sharing Plugin for WordPress

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The URL Sharing Plugin adds a text field with the post URL at the end of your posts – a qz.com like sharing approach. Additionally you get a button that enables copying the URL to the user’s clipboard. Look at the end of this post to see a live version of the plugin.

The plugin can be used as a more privacy-friendly alternative to sharing buttons or as an additional sharing-option. I was inspired by Dominik’s post about readability and usability on blogs (in German) who uses the Quartz-like approach – something I wanted to have, too.

URL share implementation on qz.com.
URL share implementation on qz.com.

Download

You have two options to get the code:

Installation

  1. Upload the files in your plugins directory. Then activate it.
  2. For a label in front of the URL and a text on the copy-to-clipboard-button, go to the settings page and insert your strings in the input fields. Of course, you can leave the label blank, the button, however, should have a call to action.

Change style

You can change the styling by adding your changes to stylesheet of the plugin. The URL Sharing plugin uses three CSS-elements:

  • .url_share: div-container
  • .url_share_label: label of the input field
  • .url_share_input: input field
  • .zeroclipboard-is-hover: hover status for copy-button
  • .zeroclipboard-is-active: active status for copy-button

In the default version url_share_label and url_share_input don’t have values and therefore are using your theme’s style for label and input. Of course, you can change them just the way you want. For example: To change the color of the URL to red, add the following to the plugin’s stylesheet or your theme’s stylesheet: .url_share_input {color:red;}

To-do List

Things that might be considered in the future:

  • Enable font color change of the URL in backend
  • Offer a PHP-Snippet to enable more flexible positioning
  • A button to automatically copy the URL to the user’s clipboard (by using an existing JavaScript library)Added with version 1.1 by using ZeroClipboard

Questions? Comments?

If you have any remarks and/or questions, feel free to leave a comment.