How to manually add content to your Paper.li

Have you tried using the Publish-it bookmarklet to manually add content to your Paper.li recently?

This is a great feature and it has been around for awhile. In fact, we launched it back in 2011 and I was recently surprised to see it was one of the more frequently searched terms on our support forum the past couple of weeks.

So I thought it was time for a short "what, why and how" on using the Publish-it bookmarklet.


What is a bookmarklet? A bookmarklet is a javascript bookmark that you store on your favorites or bookmarks bar that allows you to easily save content to a service. In our case, the Publish-it bookmarklet helps you add a favorite article, image or video to your paper.

Why should you use it? We do our best to fetch and deliver the content you've asked us to daily, but it's possible that we miss a piece that you think is relevant to your community along the way.

The bookmarklet is a great way to fill in any content holes you find and is a convenient way to add content on the fly when you come across it.

Here are three ways the bookmarklet can help you:

Curate a paper from "just about" scratch. Perhaps you want a finely tuned paper with not a lot of content. You may add just one source to lightly populate your paper and use the bookmarklet to add in the rest. I speak to numerous consultants who use this approach. They add only their blog's RSS as a feed and curate in the other handful articles they want to share with their community. Keep your weekly looking like a daily. Many publishers want the ease of a weekly with the "freshness" of a daily and with the smallest amount of time possible spent on grooming. The bookmarklet is perfect for this. It allows the addition of new content to a paper during the week without refetching the base content. Collaboration. The bookmarklet is a time saver for teams, departments, event organizers or anyone working together on a Paper.li. Any collaborator on a paper can install the bookmark in their favorites and add content on the fly.  Distributing workload frees up a little more time for everyone. Additionally group curation can lend to a nice (or eclectic!) blend of content on a paper. That's fun!
We just improved the bookmarklet  with new functionality. Now it's possible to categorize the piece of content you've selected before you add it to a paper. This is exremeley helpful in reducing the time spent on editing and re-categorizing content if you don't like the topic we've assigned to it.

How to install it: here's a short 90 second video on how to get going with the bookmarklet. In truth the installation is done in about 5 seconds. We took 90 because we enjoy chatting.

Give it a try and leave a comment below. Let me know what you think and if you find it helpful.



Posted byKelly Hungerford