Pressy WordPress theme

Announcing the launch of Pressy, a free WordPress ‘social bookmarking’ theme based on the Thematic framework with automated screen-grabbing functionality.

About 3 weeks ago, someone told me about the ‘Press This’ WordPress bookmarklet. In all the years I’ve been using WordPress, it completely went under my radar. How did that happen?!

Anyhoot, it got me thinking…

A big part of my job is finding, sharing & storing information & useful stuff I’ve found online. I do that via social bookmarking tools like twitter, blogging and micro-blogging. All have their upsides and downsides. I love the ease of delicious, but it’s not very pretty or visual for my audience, and ideally I like to ‘own’ the media I publish to which is why I tend to do most of my sharing via my blog.

So I’ve been working on an idea for a new type of WordPress theme which brings together social bookmarking and blogging and here it is: Pressy.

Hey presto! You’ve got a social bookmarking tool which you can integrate with any browser to host your own tagged and categorised bookmarks with screenshots!

Check out the demo on a random url, or download the theme here (39k zip file).

How does it work?

There’s a load of information on how to install and use the ‘Press This’ bookmarklet here but it’s pretty simple: just drag the ‘Press This’ link under Tools > Tools onto your browser and you’re all set.

When you bookmark a page using the ‘Press This’ button, a link to the article is automatically inserted into a new draft post ready for you to write about, tag, categorise and publish. Recently BM Shots launched a plugin which ties into the WordPress core’s screen-grabbing technology (with their permission). I’ve adapted the BM Shot code so that this link is automatically converted into a screengrabbed image. The page title of the linked webpage is automatically converted into the post title, and linked to the source.

Known issues

• The website you’re bookmarking may return a page specifically designed for a US audience, as I’ve found with the BBC from the UK
• The WordPress screenshotting engine is not instantaneous so for a few seconds, your post will appear with a ‘screenshot coming soon’ message
• The bookmarklet automatically inserts a full stop at the end of the URL, which needs to be deleted (the full stop, not the url) for formatting purposes (anyone want to suggest a fix to this I’d love to integrate it into the functions.php file)