Your content is generally shared via posts or pages you author yourself. But there may be other resources (e.g., a news article, blog post, data source, or organizational website) you discover online and wish to share. Here are two different ways to do this:
- Press This. Go to Tools > Available Tools on your site dashboard, and you’ll see a little bookmarklet called Press This. Drag it to your browser’s bookmarks bar, then click on it whenever you see content online you’d like to share. The bookmarklet will automatically compose a post with a title and link to the resource, then you can add/edit text, enter appropriate categories/tags, and publish! Here’s more help on Press This.
- PressForward. What if your site has several users, and you’d all like to share resources? You could each use Press This, but a more advanced solution is Press Forward, a plugin that allows groups to mutually curate content (e.g., so that only high quality resources get published on the site). To do this, ask your DS multisite admins to activate the Press Forward plugin on your site, then read the manual on how to use it. Here are some pointers:
- PressForward has a bookmarklet, Nominate This, that allows anyone to nominate a resource for consideration; just go to PressForward > Tools on your dashboard to get it. It also has a built-in RSS aggregator, so that you can subscribe to one or more RSS feeds of potential content.
- The PressForward process involves three steps: (a) first, find content (online or via RSS feeds; see above); (b) nominate selected content for consideration; then (c) approve nominated content, which converts it to a draft post you can then finalize and publish.
- PressForward includes a number of tools for curators to interact over steps (b) and (c) above, so that the process is similar to how journals use peer review or newspapers use editorial control over content. In short, the whole process of sharing resources becomes social!