Fun with snippets: Quote blocks in your blog posts
Friday and screencast time again! This time on a feature some have talked about before. Dave Burke has some excellent tips for using them here, Adonis Bitar talks about how he uses them. I am talking about Text Parts, or as they seems to be called now, "Snippets".
If I would give a quick overview explanation of what they are, I would say they are shortcuts to inserting text snippets into your blog posts. The text could be just text, or, as Dave showed in his article above, HTML snippets. You create a snippet by giving it a name, which will be the shortcut you use later, you give the snippet a link and/or some text to replace the shortcut with.
When you want to use the snippet (or shortcut) in a blog post you just type it within brackets (i.e [MySnippet]) and when you submit the post the snippet/shortcut is replaced with the link and/or text to replace with. Knowing that, you could probably see that there are numerous areas in which they could be used. You could use it for adding text or HTML that you use a lot in your posting, or for example use the Text Part framework in developing a CSModule giving the user a special snippet which gives instruction to your CSModule, and provides much more advanced uses of the snippets.
In todays screencast, I want to show you just one area that I myself just started to use snippets for. I realized that there are no quotes function in the blogs like there are in the forums. You know, where you can put a quote in a block with different formatting so it is easy to recognize as a quote. So I made to two snippets for that, one start quote and one end quote. Sit down in your favorite chair with a freshly brewed cup of coffe, relax, and have a look. :-)
Wacth the screencast (Flash, opens in a new window)