January 24, 2022

Quotebacks V1.1.4

Tweaks, fixes and full article saving

Quotebacks is a chrome extension for saving quotes and a quasi-standard for making text quoting more interesting. The ultimate ambition is for it to encourage and activate a deeper cross-blogger discussion space. To promote diverse voices and encourage networked writing to flourish.

It’s built in collaboration with Toby Shorin and I couldn’t agree more with Toby when he says “We’re not so good at maintaining it, but it’s one of my favorite projects.”

Amen to that.

Anyway - we just pushed a new version live in the Chrome store with a few bits and bobs:

Full Article Saving & Bug Fixing

The chrome extension1 now saves both the highlighted quote AND the full text from the page you’re on. You can toggle between them in a new “article view” in the dashboard (see the link “click me for article view”):

We’re using readability.js under the hood to extract the full article text so you can save and read it right inside the extension.

In addition - there’s a few minor bug fixes, most notably we’ve tweaked the manifest so it should work for Linux users (hopefully! I don’t have a machine to test it on).

Check out the latest version here.

The Future of Quotebacks?

At this point I think it’s fair to assume limited future releases from Toby and I. Everything works pretty well and I’m pleased we got it to this point. Given everything Toby and I have on our plates I think it’s unlikely we’ll extend Quotebacks into the more ambitious territory of hosting quotes in a centralized database or creating some kind of analytics layer…

I’m going to keep maintaining the extension and you never know - if inspiration strikes I think there’s potential for some interesting future directions. But for now let’s not expect those any time soon!

But - if you have ideas or suggestions we’d love to hear them. Are you using Quotebacks? What bugs are you finding? What did you wish it could do? Drop us a note.

  1. Firefox will be updated soon when I can figure out how to navigate their approvals process again. Soon hopefully. 


This blog is written by Tom Critchlow, an independent strategy consultant living and working in Brooklyn, NY. If you like what you read please leave a comment below in the comments or sign up for my newsletter.