Pull Quotes
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
I wanted to add pull quotes to my blog posts for added impact. I was taking a break from doing research on the topic when I just happened to come across David Walsh’s post entitled Better Pull Quotes with MooTools. I’m not a MooTools user, but David’s post mentioned that his effort was based on Chris Coyier’s post on CSS-Tricks titled Better Pull Quotes: Don’t Repeat Markup. I checked out the post and it seemed easy to implement, so I decided to give it a go. As Chris says, “Pull quotes are wonderful.“
I’m not certain that I’m ready to go that far, but they do add a nice touch to the presentation of your blog. I managed to get it working, but I found that I had to modify my WordPress Welcome theme to the point where it was no longer generic. I went back and read the comments on Chris’ post and I noticed one by Stephen Rider who is the author of the pull-quotes plugin for WordPress. Stephen mentioned that he liked Chris’ technique and that he was interested in “borrowing” it. Since the post was over a year old I assumed that might have already happened.
I decided to drop all the custom code from my Welcome theme and start over. I found Stephen’s Pull-Quotes WordPress Plugin’s Page and downloaded the latest copy of his plugin. As usual with WordPress plugins it was trivial to set up and configure and in a matter of minutes I had quotes working on my site. I decided I was happy with one of the default themes (Modern) so no additional formatting was needed.
I think the real trick for me is going to be knowing when I should use pull-quotes. Overuse them and they just become noise. Under use them and you miss an opportunity to draw interest to an important post. I’ll have to let my audience (all 3 of you) be the judge of how successful I am in my latest blogging endeavor.