Whenever I quote from other sites, I use code like this: <blockquote cite="source url">Quoted Source</blockquote> and then I use Simon Willison’s blockquote citations javascript to automatically generate a link to the page I’ve quoted from (which is the link that says “source” after the quote).

Of course, this slows down the writing a bit: copy the quote, paste into editor, put blockquote tags around it, add the URL for the cite element, copy all, paste into blog post. It doesn’t take long, but computers are meant to be good at doing this kind of thing themselves, right? There must be a better way.

After reading John Udell’s piece on Interactive Microcontent I’ve now got a piece of javascript that creates my code for me. I just highlight some text on a page, hit the “quote” shortcut in my links bar and voila my blockquoted-and-cited extract is ready for me to use.

Another ten seconds a day saved!

I’ve now updated this to pull out the current page title and insert this as the title attribute of the blockquote, which now gets displayed in the link to the source, hurrah!