One of my absolute favourite plugins on Habari is the Publish Quote plugin written by Michael. The plugin has done well by me for like over a year, but in my mind there is some room for slight improvement in the way it operates. Habari does a great job of staying out of your way (as I found out the hard way) and I feel that this plugin is really a direct extension of that, which will make it even easier for you to actually publish your thoughts quicker and faster, ultimately making you blog more.

Currently the plugin works by taking you back to main admin panel with all the various fields filled in (according to your option preferences). There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this approach. As long as you’re logged in, you have no problems (and seeing as I use the persistence of memory plugin my Scott, I’m ok on that front as well).

Proposal

My absolute favourite bookmarklet of all time has got to be the one used by Asaph. I've been using that particular software since it came out and it's done extremely well for me, even thought it's never been updated since it's release (save for a minor point release).

The ‘new’ Publish quote plugin would operate in a similar fashion. Clicking the bookmarklet would provide a drop down card which would sit above the page. The card would look like this:

Details

When you click on your bookmarklet, this card slides down to reveal three pertinent fields and the save and publish buttons. The design stylings are taken from the admin panel. The background is slightly transparent (not as much as the message logs in the admin, but enough for you to notice a difference).

The card has rounded corners (to be consistent with the admin panel) and also includes the slightly greyed rounded box in the top left hand corner around the title of the plugin (more on this below).

User Experience

In my mind, the nice thing about the way in which this proposed bookmarklet operates, is that your 'workflow' is improved. You don't leave the site that you are appreciating (or not as the case may be) and wanting to write about. Your blogging experience is enhanced by not taking you away from your 'target'. The software then stays out of your way and because of that hopefully entices you to use the software more, because it's that easy.

After all the whole point of this is to communicate your thoughts and ideas as easily as possible in an enjoyable fashion.

Future Iterations

Looking to the future, while maintaining what makes this plugin elegant and useful is important. The 'Quote' text has the small greyed background (which follows the structure of the drop down menu in the main admin panel). The reason for this is to possibly allow some further functionality into the game. By choosing another option from this additional menu, you could choose to post an image from a website instead of a quote by choosing the image (in a similar way to how Asaph does this). Or simiarly you could choose a video etc. This is just one direction that this plugin could go.