Add "share" to the interaction links

[deborah]

Title:
Add "share" to the interaction links

Area:
entries

Summary:
Dreamwidth isn't a platform for tumblr or twitter style reblogging / retweeting, but it would be nice if it were easier to share others' posts with your readers. Luckily, the functionality is already in the code base! It's just not exposed via the UI.

Let's expose the "share" functionality via the UI.

Description:
We have this awesome share functionality in the code base. If you go to the URL

http://www.dreamwidth.org/update?share=http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/2013/06/11/dw-news-11-jun-2013.html

You get a new post window, ready for editing, with the subject:

dw_news | Dreamwidth News: 11 June 2013

and the body:

<a href="http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/2013/06/11/dw-news-11-jun-2013.html">dw_news | Dreamwidth News: 11 June 2013</a>

This is awesome, and we should expose it via the UI, probably in the interaction links, with "track", "share", etc. (The share URL will also work for external sites, but unless someone writes a bookmarklet or some such that's harder to work with in our UI.)

Changes to the current interface I'd suggest:

* Make it work with https (it currently doesn't)
* For dreamwidth internal URLs, change the format of the body text to

<user name="dw-news"> said "<a href="http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/2013/06/11/dw-news-11-jun-2013.html">dw_news | Dreamwidth News: 11 June 2013</a>".

Poll #13972 Add "share" to the interaction links

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 46

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
18 (39.1%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
9 (19.6%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
10 (21.7%)

(I have no opinion)
9 (19.6%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[ninetydegrees]

wow. that'd be way more useful than tell a friend for me.

[stormy]

I second that I'd rather have 'Share' than 'Tell a Friend'.

[matgb]

I had zero clue this feature existed, at all, and it's brilliant. It works with any URL and captures the page title of the target regardless.

http://www.dreamwidth.org/entry/new?share=http://www.freeorion.org/index.php/Main_Page

(was the first page I had open in a different tab)

*goes off to code bookmarklet for dw_nifty*

[marahmarie]

LJ had it the last few years I was there. (2009-2010?) DW probably went up with the feature and either a) decided not to expose it for whatever reason or b) it was still beta-ish when DW went up so wasn't exposed by default. I actually used the feature a few times there but soon came to dislike it because it allows for a lot of empty, spammy content like you see on Wordpress (and is distinctly frowned upon in strictly white-hat SEO terms - if you care about that sort of thing).

[deborah]

other possible change to my own suggestion -- I'd really like to come up with a way that is not a catastrophe of usability to make it easy to grab excerpts from the shared post and stick it inside blockquote tags. I don't want to replicate tumblr and its usability disasters (the easiest way to have a conversation with another post is almost always to quote the entire text of the post), but it would be nice to be able to quickly grab an excerpt from someone else's post and have the blockquote tags already there. I'm not sure if anyone has good ideas about this.

maybe a "quote from linked post?" button which would bring up a modal allowing selection of a single block of content which it would then put in the appropriate blockquote element. That could be made accessible pretty easily, though implementation might be a bear.

[matgb]

I had a bookmarklet that did that for a bit, and the old LJaddons Fx plugin was good for it, but I've lost both over the years. I would also like such a thing, either inbuilt or as a bookmarklet.

Given we already have the quote button for comments, I'd imagine that similar functionality could be built into a share button and I'd definitely appreciate it. You can already force an entry page to have a modicum of text into the main box, but I never finished working out the details on how to get it working fully as it required putting everything as escaped text into the URL bar which wasn't ideal.

[deborah]

Huh, yeah, I totally bet we could grab that. Just not RESTly, and as Allen has been pointing out to me, it's not like we are all that RESTish to begin with.

[swaldman]

I'm wary of making this too easy. LJ's newish Share button actually prepares your new post with the content of the old post in it - making it pretty much a one-click method of plagiarism.

Of course, if somebody wants to plagiarise they only have to copy/paste... and what we're talking about here is rather different, since it automatically gives a link to the original.

I guess my feeling is that the ability to quote would be nifty, but make sure that it is a deliberate action, and not something that is done by default.

[deborah]

I also worry less about plagiarism and more about the non-malicious situation which is rampant all over tumblr, where it is effectively impossible, depending on how something was re-blogged, to get back to the original poster. People can always edit the HTML after-the-fact but it would be nice to throw the blockquote tags and the link in a way that makes it really clear that this is a chunk of quoted text.

actually! Blockquote has a valid attribute "cite" which allows you to put in a URL from the source of the quotation. It's not exposed by any user agents that I know of, and again, there's nothing preventing the end-user from editing it out, but it does put in more of a paper trail of what has just happened, which can even be useful in the non-malicious case.

[swaldman]

wow, I never knew that. Although if no user agent implements it, it's kinda moot...

[cmshaw]

One problem here would be automatically quoting from a locked post. There would probably need to be an extra prompt layer at least.

[deborah]

Good point. We'd probably want logic that just disabled the functionality of automatic quoting from a locked post. It won't prevent people from doing it by hand, but it will prevent them from doing it by accident or trivially easily.

[matgb]

When I was working on my share this buttons (viewable on my style on my journal, broken horribly in a few cases) I was very careful to make sure the code didn't show up on locked posts (they're on my friends page) which required me learning new coding tricks in S2 but was definitely worth it.

I'd say disable the feature completely on locked posts, locked means don't share to me, and I'm normally the everything-is-public-link-to-anything guy.

Oh, my.

[marahmarie]

I'm using your code for that (have been forever) and they're showing up on locked posts. On my Reading page. Didn't know they were not supposed to (and haven't altered your code in any way I can think of to make them show up as so). Any thoughts on that?

[aedifica]

Yeah, locked posts was my immediate concern when I read the suggestion. I'm voting "with changes" with the changes being "disable this feature on locked posts."

[ninetydegrees]

Privacy issues aside, would it be possible to select the text click 'share' then have your selection automatically blockquoted? Without any sort of additional clicking I mean. And would that be ui-friendly?

[deborah]

I bet it would, using the same mechanism the current quick-reply quoting functionality uses. And screen readers and keyboards can allow selection, though it's a pain.

[ninetydegrees]

Hmm. Don't you have to click on 'quote' to quote' in quick reply?

[deborah]

yeah, but it does automatically grab anything that's selected when you do it. Doesn't it? Let's see ...

quick r

answer, yes, although getting it to work with assistive technology is a no go at least at this immediate moment. But that might just be my setup.

[ninetydegrees]

I think I meant something different. Like you wouldn't have to hit quote. If we take quick reply, just selecting a block then clicking 'reply to this' would have the block already quoted in the reply form. Magic-like.

[kerravonsen]

My "with changes":
1) disable this feature on locked posts.
2) if it's possible, have it "quote" selected text from the post; do NOT have it pull in the entire content of the post, but something to make it easier to pull in a quote from it.

[kyrielle]

+1.

It'd be nice if I could choose whether to have it on my posts or not. I know that any public post *MAY* be freely shared. But the presence of a share button implies I am *encouraging* sharing it rather than *accepting* that someone may share it. And...mostly, my journal is just that. Someone might link or quote a post (public or otherwise), yes. But that doesn't mean I want to suggest they do so.

[montuos]

+1

[fujicori]

+1

[susanreads]

Either make this optional for the OP (remember what you used last time), or failing that, disable on locked posts.