27 June 2009

Apture

Apture is a service that allows content producers to link to media without sending users away from their site. So, if you want your readers to check out a cool music video, or learn a fantasmic new word, or get background information on an obscure figure, you could provide links which pop up smallish windows that keep the readers on your own site.

The editing magic is really in a widget added to blogger that allows you to easily embed/link to content while you are authoring a post. All you have to do is highlight a word, and click the apture button which is located on the blogger editor box along with the standard "bold", "italicize", and "insert link" buttons. An apture modal window pops up with a search box that is already populated with the highlighted text. You can search for all available content, or click on tabs for different media types, like pictures, video, audio, etc.

When you are done picking the media, apture creates a standard hypertext link with an "id" attribute that is prefixed with "aptureLink", which some apture javascript processes.

That javascript is contained in a sidebar widget which Apture adds to your blogspot. However, I removed the sidebar and just added the <script/> to the botton of my page template.

Cool stuff.

2 comments:

Pelechati said...

Hey Jon,

What is your twitter ID so we can call you out on the Apture twitter account.

Jon said...

Hi, I'm @hoffrocket