WordPress Emphasis Plugin: Highlight and Permalink Text

TL;DR: One-click implementation of the New York Times open source emphasis script as a WordPress plugin which allows for highlighting and permalinking of text on a paragraph and sentence level.

❗ Heads up! This post is archived and here for historical purposes. It may no longer be accurate or reflect my views. Proceed at your own risk.

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The New York Times recently open-sourced their nifty wizardry which allows users to highlight and link to specific text within an article or post. In their own words:

Emphasis provides dynamic paragraph-specific anchor links and the ability to highlight text in a document, all of which is made available in the URL hash so it can be emailed, bookmarked, or shared.

I adapted the New York Time’s implementation into a three-line WordPress plugin for my own site, and it is available in the WordPress plugin repository as a one-click install, to add it to your own.

The “deep links” plugin allows for permalinking and highlighting of text on a paragraph and sentence level. No need to set anything up. Just install, tap shift twice, and start highlighting.

Originally published January 11, 2011 | View revision history

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Ben Balter is the Director of Engineering Operations and Culture at GitHub, the world’s largest software development platform. Previously, as Chief of Staff for Security, he managed the office of the Chief Security Officer, improving overall business effectiveness of the Security organization through portfolio management, strategy, planning, culture, and values. As a Staff Technical Program manager for Enterprise and Compliance, Ben managed GitHub’s on-premises and SaaS enterprise offerings, and as the Senior Product Manager overseeing the platform’s Trust and Safety efforts, Ben shipped more than 500 features in support of community management, privacy, compliance, content moderation, product security, platform health, and open source workflows to ensure the GitHub community and platform remained safe, secure, and welcoming for all software developers. Before joining GitHub’s Product team, Ben served as GitHub’s Government Evangelist, leading the efforts to encourage more than 2,000 government organizations across 75 countries to adopt open source philosophies for code, data, and policy development. More about the author →

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