In this tutorial I’ll show you two ways to add quotes from other sites, using copy and paste. The tutorial also covers what’s acceptable in terms of quoting, using other people’s images, and correct attribution of sources.
How to use other sites to create a post
Let’s imagine you’re surfing the web and you come across a story and think "I should blog about that!"
Copy an extract. Never copy the whole article – it’s not polite. You need to pick one or two quotations and then weave them in to your own post.
Create a new blog post
(Tip) I have two browser windows open, one for the original article and one for my new post so I can swap between them).
Create your new post, give it a title (always important!) and write your post, pasting the quote in where you need it to appear, as above.
Format the quote
You need to make it clear it’s a quote from somewhere else. If the quotation is more than a few lines long, the usual way to do this is to make it what we call "block quote" format.
Select the quotation and click the icon that looks like a double quote mark (where the arrow is pointing above).
That formats the quote according to the rules of the template you use. In this case it has inset the text and made it italic.
Credit where credit is due
It’s vital that you credit the original source of the quotation and to do that you create a link.
Go to the web page you got the quote from and copy the URL in the address bar, as in the image above.
In this case the most obvious place to make the link is where I use the name of the web site. Select the text you want to turn in to a link and then click the chain icon above.
That brings up the "insert/edit link" window and you can paste the URL in there.
The finished post
I’ve added a category and a tag here. I should probably add an image as well (instructions to do that are in another tutorial)
When you’re happy, click "Publish".
And here’s the finished post on the web site. Note the formatted quotation, the link, and the category and tag. It really could do with an image though!
