You come across a blog that you really love, say like this one or BenSpark.com (shameless plug) and you want to grab a screenshot of the blog to post in your own blog post. Or maybe you are reading a blog post and you want to snag a quote. You can certainly do it by hitting print screen and then editing the image in a graphics editor. For quotes you could copy the quote and put it in italics and be done with it. However you could do better.
Supposed I wanted to capture the screenshot from my post last week. I could go to the post and then just click the Clp.ly bookmark in my bookmark toolbar of Chrome and instantly I go to Clip.ly to choose which screenshot from the post I want to use. You are presented with the entire post and you can move the slider up and down to pick the specific screenshot you are looking for. Here is what the clipped Screenshot looks like.
So you can see that the screen shots are not only up on the page but there is attribution back to there you clipped the screenshot. If you click on the screenshot you go to an intermediary page and then to the page where the screenshot was clipped. I’m not a huge fan of that because I’d rather go right to the page from the screenshot. It is a five second intermediary page but none the less I’m not a fan.
The system does work really easily though. I even grabbed a quote from that post.
Basically if you wanted to guest post for my blog you’d open with a paragraph that let me know that you knew who I was and at the same time tell me who you are and what you are about.
From www.bloggingtips.com via clp.ly
In all the site is really useful and can help you add great content to your blog. You can even track the clips that you made and if people wanted to use your clips you can track that too. This video tells you all about how Clip.ly works.
Thanks for the great tip. Thought you should know that the link in this post actually took me to bit.ly and it is spelled incorrectly. The actual link should be http://clp.ly/content/quick-start
Thanks again!
Craig
Craig,
Looks like I added an i to the name and that made the link default to bit.ly for some reason. Thanks for letting me know I will fix it.
Nice review Drew. Thanks so much. Great feedback on the interstitial. This is the type of feedback we love. Looking forward to hearing feedback from your readers.
Mary,
Glad that you liked the review, I enjoy the service and find it rather useful. I'm glad that you understand the importance of removing the interstitial. It does a couple of things, it causes a slowdown and it doesn't have a direct link to the source on the blog post. If I clip something from Chris Brogan or Copyblogger I want them to know I did it and they would immediately if the link in the code went directly to their blogs.
Good feedback. The interstitial is going away for most use cases and we are going back to a 301 redirect which preserves referrer and SEO value (there are a couple of odd cases where it's useful, mostly to get Facebook to use a screenshot as the link image but we can make that transparent to users)
Look for a new code push in the next day or so to take care of this.
John,
Great to hear that. I think that will attract more users to the system.
I have to say I love clp.ly. It is the perfect service to share lines from my site. I'm glad I found this service and I have now ended up using this service almost daily now! I highly recommend this all people, clips and quotes will never be the same after you use this!
Ktdata,
I'll say, it looks like most of your posts are using clp.ly. That is great. I need to figure out more uses for it and quote more.
Thank for the very good Tip
Thanks Bjoern,
Glad I could help.
It's a very useful post which will make the work easier for bloggers while writing posts.
BT Online,
Yep, any little tool that can help is a nice one to have in your arsenal.
Hi Ben,
Really useful post. Could you tell me if there is a similar feature for firefox. Although i have been playing around with chrome recently.I do like it but not quite ready to make the transition.
Thanks Ben
Pete
Pete,
Works the same way in Firefox, here are the installation instructions – http://clp.ly/content/installing-clply-tools
How does it to compare to SnagIt which I am a seriously big fan of.
SnagIt costs money and requires a download, does more. clp.ly is free and works on any browser with no download.
I too confused with the firefox option,because i too use the firefox browser as compared to the other one.For writing purpose its would be dam help full,i am going to use thies above tips,
Thanks