Eli Grey

CiteDrag drag and drop script

Firefox 3.1 beta 2 recently added support for the standard drag and drop model (also with some extra Mozilla-only ones). I had an idea to automatically add citation info to text dragged from websites to plain and rich text editors using this newly supported API. I named the finished script CiteDrag, which requires no setup other than adding a single script tag anywhere in your website’s page. CiteDrag is licensed GNU LGPL and free to download in two flavors: CiteDrag and CiteDrag + Drag Image. CiteDrag + Drag Image is all of the normal CiteDrag code with some additional code to give a fancy canvas-generated drag image that shows the text content being dragged. CiteDrag is mostly useful for when someone blogs about another person’s blog post. Having the text automatically go into a cited blockquote and having a link back is very useful. I have installed CiteDrag on this blog and I have a demo of it and a rich text area you can use to test out CiteDrag fully.

Here are some examples of what it does when you drag various data types to various input areas: (Note wherever it says title, it will be replaced with the host name of the source page if there is no page title)

  • Drag a link or image (or linked image) to a normal text input: { [link URI] or [image URI] } via {source title} ( {source URI} )
    • Example:  http://example.com/ via Foobar ( http://foo.bar/post/example.com-ftw/ )
  • Drag a link or image (or linked image) to a rich text input: { [clickable link to link URI] or [image URI] or [clickable image linked to link URI] } via {clickable link to source page with title as text}
  • Drag formatted or non-formatted text to a normal text input: “{Text dragged}” ― {source title} ( {source URI} )
    • Example:  “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.” ― Eli Grey ( http://www.eligrey.com/ )
  • Drag formatted or non-formatted text into a rich text input: The dragged text goes into a <blockquote cite=”{source URI}”> and after the blockquote is ― {clickable link to source page with title as text}
    • Example:

      Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

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