Content publishing is as much an art as craft. The world has been publishing static articles and stories for eons now - that's old hat. However have you ever wondered why articles and stories are so... boring and uni-dimensional? At best, articles have embedded tweets in them. Yuck. And videos.
As a side note, I never understood why a digital publisher gives away traffic and juice to Twitter or Youtube etc. Especially by embedding a tweet, one is actually inviting readers to bounce and go into the rabbit hole of the attention economy.
Some advanced data journalists are doing some superb publishing by embedding rich data visualizations within the article, rather than just images of the visualizations. Sometimes these visualizations are well done and responsive across various device screens - but mostly the experience is subpar on mobile screens.
One could use some providers via a service like embed.ly, but those all cost a ton of money when running a thriving network, and hence adoption is very low. And more importantly, none of these mechanisms are seamless. An "embed" by its very nature is an iframe and does not integrate into the network's member flow seamlessly. Its a third party service, with its own login process, and finally the headache of data import and export into that tool and additional headache of extracting actionable intelligence from that data is too much for people to contend with.
Your story deserves more
What if all these tools were integrated into one offering, giving the author a seamless ability to create interactive posts and publish? Now how cool would that be? I wish someone would solve this pain point.
Oh, wait, we did it already. Yahoo!
Our full featured Long Form Editor has rich formatting, no word length limitations, inline article images and tables and more. Add a featured image and voila! you are all set to share your original story with the world.
Edit 02/10/21 - Further contents of this post are now deprecated and left for posterity. These help resources contain the up-to-date information at any time:
"Standard" controls
The editor allows one to use rich formatting - headings, pull quotes, bullets. The post can be enriched with responsive images and tables, with shiny captions (which are very good for SEO). And the posts can be edited as desired.
Image handling
Images are handled in the most seamless and convenient way possible. One does not need to worry about any aspect of image management when using the Long Form Editor. All the complexity is taken care of behind the scene, leaving you to focus on what's important.
Images can be inserted in myriad ways
- Using the image button on the toolbar
- Drag and drop from a folder
- Paste from clipboard of a screenshot
The editor will automatically resize and compress the image before uploading to ensure fast download times.
When uploading, a visual spinner is shown so that the author knows that image upload is in progress.
Jpeg, png and webp image types are permittted. For security reasons, svg is not permitted.
Images can be individually captioned and the editor turns them into Alt text. Apparently, search engines go weak at the knees at such things.
Video handling
Click the "Add video" button on the toolbar and then enter a YouTube or Vimeo link to insert a video anywhere in the body. Like here.
Content copy-paste
You could copy content from any source and paste into the editor and it will JustWork :-). Give it a try, the output will be superb highly readable text using the selected formatting that we have carefully allowed for legibility. You can bring in text from online sources, word processing documents, excel sheets etc. All extraneous material will be stripped away.
The reverse is also true, any content copied from the editor can be pasted into any editor of your choice and is also fully portable between multiple editors windows.
Want more?
There's more on offer for Pro accounts. Older posts being brought in from another platform can be back dated to match the original publication date.
A series of articles can be linked together as multi-part articles.
The article can be part of a Story Arc.
Rich tables
Need rich tables that will automatically scroll and resize? Here we go:
