Boost Your Blog with ‘Press This’ Bookmarklet: Reblogging Made Easy

Among all the features in WordPress, Press This could probably be one of the least known. Have you heard about it? Even though it has been included since the early versions of WordPress with the name of Press It, not many people use it as a blogging tool.

Press This is a bookmarklet. By using Press This, you can grab bits of content, images, links, or embedded video that you find interesting from any website, and then use them as part of your new post. In the other word, it is also known as a Reblog, like what you do in Tumblr.

Getting Started

Press This can be found under the Tools > Available Tools side-menu of WP-Admin. Drag and drop it onto the bookmark bar.

Using Press This

Simply highlight the content that you want to grab, and hit the Press This bookmark. A new window with the WordPress content editor will appear.

As you can see above, Press This grabs the highlighted content and automatically populates the Title field with the Post Title. In addition, it also includes the link source of the content, which makes crediting the source very easy for us. This is also helpful when we need to verify content copyright, policy and permissions before adding the content onto the blog.

To add images, click the “Image” icon. It will grab all pull-able images from the source. Press This will also copy the image into your blog when it is inserted into the post, instead of linking it from the source.

Click on the next icon to embed the video. A new text field will slide down; this is where you put the code to embed the video. If you run Press This in a video-sharing site like Youtube.com, this field will automatically be populated with the code.

Press This Reloaded

Some functionalities in the Press This content editor have been removed. What remains are the WYSIWYG Editor, which also has been simplified but if you want the full-fledged content editor, you can install Press This Reloaded. Once installed, you have to re-add Press This to the bookmark bar from Tools > Available Tools.

With Press This Reloaded, you can add Featured Image, and the WYSIWYG Editor now shows an Advanced Toolbar. When you are done, you can save your post as Draft, or Publish it immediately.