Emphasis

I built something like this for The New York Times and it was one of the more fun projects I did there. The thing I really hoped this "new" version would account for is when text changes and having links survive minor edits/changes. Perhaps I missed it and it does. - https://github.com/NYTimes/Emphasis - https://open.nytimes.com/emphasis-update-and-source-6ffac5e6... (2011)

When I was working at The New York Times as a front-end developer I wanted to create a system where you could deep-link to any paragraph in a story, and potentially highlight passages of text. Referencing a paragraph by order is very simple, but would not work in this case. It is not common for stories to be edited (correction, or updated as news event information becomes available) after publish - but it can happen. Likewise the inner text of the article could change. Long-story short, I figured out the JS, learned about the Levenshtein distance for the first time, and built a robust tool that worked. Small things make me happy. I also launched it without telling anyone. The blog post was retractive. Source code: https://github.com/nytimes/Emphasis More information: https://archive.nytimes.com/open.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/1...

The usage isn't as _pretty_ as Chromes but usage allows for changes in original text to not break the link: https://github.com/NYTimes/Emphasis

Not saying its the best one but I built a system we used on the NYTimes web site for awhile that was fault tolerant and adjusted to changes in the page: https://github.com/NYTimes/Emphasis

It's not a blog engine, but NYT's Emphasis library does implement deep linking & highlighting of specific sentences. https://github.com/NYTimes/Emphasis

I'd say have good typography, and use headings with anchor links (href="#foo") with a button next to it, so people can save their position, and return to it later. You can also help with this (for non-touch devices) by using the NYT's emphasis.js: https://github.com/NYTimes/Emphasis. Manual (not automated) pagination is also an option for letting people know when to breathe. Otherwise, it's also going to be really hard for people to link to more specific parts of it.

Is this similar to https://github.com/NYTimes/Emphasis? What's new?

I have a theory that big interactive pieces like that are Googleesque 20% time for the journalists and/or interactive folks that work there. I can't speak for the Times because, as another comment points out, they stand alone in journalism; however, every outfit I've ever worked at did not have enough hours in a day to pull off pieces like that with the workforce at employ. There's at least one person from the digital side of the Times that contributes to Hacker News, the person that wrote the fantastic Emphasis[1]. (I've been looking for a chance to use it.) Wonder if he'll -- forgive the ambiguity, I've forgotten his username -- show up in this thread and shed some light on our speculation. EDIT: Ah, he's left the NYT[2]. [1]: https://github.com/NYTimes/Emphasis [2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=donohoe

Fork it! (oh, and tap Shift key 2 times, not 4) Take a look at the Source on Github which has been updated from the original I wrote for the NYT. It also now uses jQuery (NYT was dependent on PrototypeJS) https://github.com/NYTimes/Emphasis Its a nifty project to contribute to and I welcome updates and discussion.

Previous discussion on Emphasis: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2093820 The NYTimes open sourced it: http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/emphasis-update-and... https://github.com/NYTimes/Emphasis