Highlight Blocks
Embed Highlights in Medium & WordPress Posts
Strong writing pulls in and builds upon other strong writing. Incorporating sampled passages is an effective way to reiterate, reexamine, and re-contextualize ideas, connect new thoughts to earlier lines of thinking, or simply bring fresh information in.
Called blockquotes — or blurbs, colloquially — their digital style has its roots in early print production.
These sampled passages … dramatic pause … are highlights. 🤯
Blockquotes are highlights by another name, in another context.
Every Highly highlight is an idea-shaped object — something to save for yourself, share with your teammates, send off into the socialsphere, and starting today, embed within new stories. Highly highlights now do double-duty as blockquotes in Medium and WordPress posts.
Each block contains the highlight text, the story’s title, source and heatmap, and the highlighter’s avatar. They’re all linked, so you can dig deeper into the highlight, the story or the reader.
If you’ve enabled Highly in your browser, clicking the highlight will take you directly to the highlight in its original context. Natch.
Anil Dash lists embeddables among the missing building blocks of the web:
Kate Harris of Smithsonian Learning Lab captures the value of curation nicely:
And if you read Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, you know full well how integral blockquotes can be. Ben uses blocks to pull in current sources and surface themes from his earlier writing, to great flow and effect.
How To Add Highlight Blocks to Your Posts
Every Highly highlight has a unique link. Find it while you’re highlighting by selecting Share, then Link. Copy the link.
- On Medium, simply paste the link into your story and press
Enter. - On WordPress, get the Embedly Plugin and follow their instructions.
Show and Tell
We’d love to see how you use Highlight Blocks — please share your highlight-infused posts with us on Twitter @HighlyTM or email heyo@highly.co.
✋ Hi-five to the Embedly team for laying the groundwork.
Highly is the Internet’s Highlight Layer
Highlight darn near anything, share the meaty parts instead of timesucking links, and see your peoples’ highlights as you surf the web.
At home, start each day with your Highly newspaper: the important ideas in the stories your people are reading.
At work, it’s unprofessional to share a story without highlighting it. Save your team time, spark productive convos, and maximize shared knowledge with Highly for Teams — in Slack, too.
