The other day while I was giving a presentation on WordPress and its many uses as an educational tool to a group of faculty members at a local university interested in incorporating blogging in their teaching approach, one professor expressed a great deal of displeasure with WordPress and its apparent lack of functionality.
One of the most interesting involved his pointing out that Blogger offered BlogThis and WordPress did not. Blog This enables bloggers to cite either other blogs or websites and create a blog entry from that. In its simplest terms, you have the ability to create unique content from someone else’s original entry and build upon it either in support or opposition. It is a great little feature in Blogger but hardly new. The WordPress version is titled PressThis.
Anyway, this got me to thinking that there may be others who think this is only a blogger option. Or maybe there are some bloggers out there who simply aren’t aware of these two tools that can, at times, come in very handy indeed.
BlogThis! – The Blogspot Option
If you use Google’s Blogger to host your outdoor blog, the simplest way to take advantage of Blog This, is to load up Google’s Chrome browser. Chrome is my browser choice for purely surfing, it’s fast, nimble, and gets me where I want to go without all of the bells and whistles of IE or Firefox. Once you have Chrome fully installed:
Go to the Chrome Web Store, search for it, and click the “Add to Chrome” button to install the BlogThis extension.
Once BlogThis is installed you will see it present on your Chrome navigation bar. Now if you come across a blog posts that inspires you to post all you need to do is navigate to the post and click the orange “Blogthis” button. The system will ask you to log in if you aren’t already and then will display a little pop-up window with the link to the original post in it and where you can formulate either a short comment or blog post regarding the article you want to highlight. In my example I’ll use my latest post about Karen Lee of the National Wild Turkey Federation. As you can see below, its pretty clean, simple, and efficient to spread the word about a quality post.
Press This – The WordPress Option
Press This, similar to that of the BlogThis option is easily installed on your toolbar as well, though it is much less finicky with what browser you use. Even with Internet Explorer 9 it was basically a drag-and-drop operation to the tool bar and I was ready to rock.
To place the PressThis button on the browser toolbar:
- Log in to my WordPress dashboard
- Navigate to Settings > Writing
- Drag the Press This button from the administrative page to your browser toolbar
Once you have Press This on your toolbar, as illustrated above, you are ready to bookmark and comment on other outdoor bloggers and their entries by simply navigating to the blog post you would like to add to, click the Press This button, and then have at it.
