My new favorite WordPress find is the “Press This” tool. Although I’ve been working with WordPress for quite a while, this Tool has escaped my attention because the first time I tried to use it, I got a 403 Error. Now that I know that it is a simple setting that your web host can change quickly and easily, I now have it on all of my sites.
To those of you new to WordPress, Press This is a bookmarklet that automatically opens a WordPress Add New Post page in a pop-up window that allows you to easily create a new post based on the external page you are currently viewing.
Getting It To Work
In the Admin Page of your WordPress site, click Tools. In the Tools window, you’ll see a button titled “Press This”. Make sure that you have the Bookmarks bar visible in your browser window and simply click and drag the “Press This” button into your Bookmarks bar.
Now that you have the Bookmarklet (a bookmark with a function) in your bookmarks bar, browse to the webpage that you would like to reblog on your own site. Now select any text that you would like to quote in your post and click the Press This Bookmarklet. A popup will open with the selected text already included in the body of the post, along with a link to the full article. Reblogging etiquette suggests that you always include the link to the original post. When I reblog, I always select this quoted text and format it as a blockquote by using the ” button in the post formatting toolbar. Then I add my own comments about the article or the subject of the article above the blockquote.
Now that you have the content of the post finished, clicking the appropriate “Add:” shortcut (above the post formatting toolbar) will display all the images from the original page. Click on the image you would like to include and, voila!, the image is added to the post! Now select the Category and include any Tags you would like and you are ready to either save the post as a Draft or Publish it using the buttons in the top right corner of the window.
You’re done! Isn’t it simple! And I must say that this has been the easiest post I’ve ever written, because I used “Press This” to include the following post from WPMUDev which includes a great video you can watch on how to set up and use “Press This”, so I didn’t have to leave the pop-up to write these instructions! It just doesn’t get any easier than that!
WordPress includes a bookmarklet called “Press This” to speed up your work when including text, photos, and more from other sites on the internet. Check out how it’s done, below.