Hit Shift key 4x on a NYTimes article and see what happens

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/health/doctor-panels-urge-fewer-routine-tests.html?_r=3&partner=MYWAY&ei=5065#p[MpaBtc]

by hammock • 14 years ago

127 60 14 years ago

nytimes.com

Zhenya• 14 years ago

Shows you the paragraph markup?

donohoe6• 14 years ago

Nope - it allows you to link to individual Paragraphs as well as Highlighting sentences (just click them to toggle the Highlight).

As you do this it updates the URL so you can share it.

They Keys to identify the text are generated dynamically and tolerant to change (so if a Paragraph is modified or moved later on - rare) it will still link tot he correct one within a given tolerance.

bmj• 14 years ago

Also allows you to look up the definition of a highlighted word.

zacharydanger• 14 years ago

Shows up when you double-tap the shift key.

jerrya• 14 years ago

That's nice in how it allows you to link to individual paragraphs: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/health/doctor-panels-urge-...

donohoe6• 14 years ago

You can also highlight sentences across all the text too

abrowne• 14 years ago

You only need to press shift twice; the pilcrows that appear are paragraph-specific anchor links. They explain the system a bit at http://firstlook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/a-few-new-feat...

cynwoody2• 14 years ago

A new word for the day: pilcrow. I never knew those ¶ thingies had a name other than "paragraph mark". Thanks.

Joeri• 14 years ago

You may also find its history interesting then: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/02/the-pilcrow-part-1/

Terretta• 14 years ago

> You only need to press shift twice

Timing matters.

username3• 14 years ago

Sticky Keys?

mattmanser• 14 years ago

It does seem a bizarre key choice, 5 hits of the shift key will prompt the sticky keys dialog to appear on most of the worlds computers that have a shift key.

Quite easy to do as a 'tic' when you notice this undiscoverable 'feature'.

ohashi• 14 years ago

I noticed the paragraphs after a couple clicks but was clicking too fast to stop when the change occurred. I got sticky keys too.

oasisbob• 14 years ago

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

kmfrk• 14 years ago

Thanks for this. I've always known about emphasis.js, but not the keyboard shortcut.

verisimilitude• 14 years ago

I just noticed this when I tried invoke Instant Send[0] with a modifier tap[1] in LaunchBar. A bit annoying that it blocks the LaunchBar functionality.

[0] http://www.obdev.at/resources/launchbar/help/InstantSend.htm... [1]: http://www.obdev.at/resources/launchbar/help/ModifierTaps.ht...

jack-r-abbit7• 14 years ago

ok... now that is pretty nice. I'll be adding that to my tool box. Thanks!

jack-r-abbit7• 14 years ago

huh? why the down vote?

DanBC• 14 years ago

I didn't down vote. I guess someone thought your comment was content free. It is frustrating when you have low karma for people to down vote but not explain why. Usually they balance out.

donohoe6• 14 years ago

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.

emehrkay2• 14 years ago

That seems like a lot of code to, from a simple guess, shows/hides a hyperlink.

brokentone• 14 years ago

It enables paragraph based linking and paragraph (or sentence) based highlighting. With error correction in case the article has changed. Don't guess, read the release notes (http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/emphasis-update-and... as noted many times in the comments here).

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

The pilcrow is too small. It's a small target, and I barely noticed them - I stood here tapping shift repeatedly until I quit and came to the comments to see what it was about... the grey background is also almost invisible.

mlntn• 14 years ago

I tapped Shift 6 times and a nickel spit out of my USB drive. Amazing!

RandallBrown• 14 years ago

Nothing happens in IE. Not that anyone here cares...

cynwoody2• 14 years ago

Nothing happens in Chrome 18 on Mac, either.

Works in Firefox 11, however. Also works in Safari 4 (an old version).

cnu• 14 years ago

Chrome 18.0.1025.142 beta here and works for me.

arkitaip• 14 years ago

Nothing in Opera 11.62

david_shaw• 14 years ago

Weird - works for me on Chrome 18.0.1025.142 (latest) on OS X Lion.

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

Which? I get nothing in IE10.

mthwl• 14 years ago

These are called WinerLinks, as in Dave Winer from over at scripting.com. The Times started doing this in 2010, here are his thoughts: http://scripting.com/stories/2010/11/29/theNyTimesLeadsAgain...

More info here: http://scripting.com/stories/2010/11/30/winerlinksAndOutline...

Note, that on his blog, he uses a simple, tiny # character after each paragraph to allow direct linking. No shift key required.

huhtenberg• 14 years ago

> tiny # character

... which is really annoying.

(edit) What I don't understand why he wouldn't show these # on hover over a respective paragraph.

seldo• 14 years ago

Seriously. It's honestly one of the primary reasons I can't stand reading his stuff; each little hashmark is a reminder that the writer thinks his thoughts are so important you will want to quote them by chapter and verse, like a holy text.

bengillies• 14 years ago

I believe the original name for them is Purple Numbers[1], though as Dave Winer mentions, the NYTs implementation doesn't appear to create the links properly.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Numbers

donohoe6• 14 years ago

No offense to Mr. Winer but if I thought for one moment people would call it this then I would never have been motivated to launch this code.

dsteinweg• 14 years ago

It looks like it's pulling characters from the paragraph to generate the "unique" paragraph ID. ID = First letter from the first 3 words in the first sentence in the paragraph + First letter from the first 3 words in the last sentence in the paragraph.

I wonder... for all the different articles on NYTimes, and the different configurations of words across paragraphs, is this unique enough such that you won't get duplicate paragraph IDs in any given article?

celoyd• 14 years ago

Especially because it works in exactly the way you specify even when there’s only one sentence in a paragraph. So the paragraph:

That was too much for the water district’s attorney.

And:

They were torn apart by angry ducks.

Will both hash to “TwtTwt”. One-sentence paragraphs are probably deprecated in the NYT’s style guide anyway, but I imagine it might still come up.

donohoe6• 14 years ago

One sentence paragraphs still happen but it still works :)

WiseWeasel• 14 years ago

It only has to be unique within the article, since it's added to the article path, and there would likely be some kind of provision to add or swap out for a unique character in case of conflict. It's also case-preserving, so that implies likely case-sensitivity as well. I guess we'll have to find an instance of two - probably single-sentence - paragraphs with the same characters and same capitalization in the same story to be certain.

Not it!

crazygringo• 14 years ago

I was so confused by this the other day... I didn't know why these paragraph marks were showing up all over the place.

Nice to finally find out what on earth that was!

Sidnicious• 14 years ago

Wait, does the text shuffle around for anyone else when you click on a sentence?

EDIT: It looks like an odd CSS issue: the first line of each paragraph is being hidden.

IanDrake• 14 years ago

Copy text from this article, past it somewhere and see what happens:

http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/03/31/1969051/apple-plans-n...

pbhjpbhj• 14 years ago

Will be interesting to know what the submitter makes from their affiliate link appearing in the submission.

nhebb• 14 years ago

Ooh, I wish Readable would add this. I typically only use Readable for long articles. When reading part-way through, leaving, and coming back, it's a pain to locate the paragraph where you left off.

kruhft• 14 years ago

Nothing. Ubuntu 11.10 + Firefox 10.0.2.

prodigal_erik• 14 years ago

Whoever wired this up forgot that "p[MpaBtc]" needs to actually appear in the name of an anchor for the URL to reliably point to that paragraph. Clever idea but bad authoring that just fails without javascript.

Stratego• 14 years ago

The fact that people are only now discovering this year old feature goes to show how lacking its user interface is.

It's a great idea, and a great implementation, but it has no affordance whatsoever to promote discovery.

Hit Shift key 4x on a NYTimes article and see what happens

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