Posting in #WordPress using @Storify
A couple of weeks ago, Storify announced a plug-in for WordPress that allowed you to write and publish Storify stories from within WordPress and embed (essentially cross-post) them in your blog. This sounded fantastic as it appeared to give you the rich, social embedding of Storify within the WordPress blogging environment.
However, after playing around with it for a while it is not as seamless as it would be nice to have (at the time of writing) so I have written a quick guide to getting the best out of it if you plan to use it with your blog.
What is Storify?
Storify is a web publishing tool that allows anybody to write stories/articles and publish them on the web through their own account. It has great social search features which allow you to embed links from other sources such as Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, RSS feeds, etc. You can quickly write your own version of a story and embed resources and references.
You can see my stories here for an example of how Storify stories look and how the embedding of related (social) media works.
Certainly for journalists and budding content publishers, it represents a great platform to write and get noticed. It also opens up a second readership channel as there is a community of readers around the Storify hub which may not be reading your blog. This further extends your reach as a content producer.
Using the Storify WordPress plugin
Having started to use Storify as a way to publish more in-depth integrated stories, the option to cross-post and embed these stories in your own blog sounded great. However, it’s not that straightforward.
The Storify plugin isn’t seamless and works in two discreet halves.
Firstly, there is the content production & publishing element. This actually is just an iFrame within WordPress that gives you access to your Storify account. There is no real integration here. This was confusing at first as you are presented with the WordPress wrapper around the Storify editor. Just remember that using this method only means you are publishing to Storify. To be honest, you might as well just go to storify.com and work on your story there initially.
Secondly, there is the issue of cross-posting. This is actually achieved by simply typing the Storify URL into a new post in WordPress (you go to ADD NEW in your posts section just like you would when adding any post to your blog). On a new line you simply enter the Storify URL (e.g. http://storify.com/EdwardTerry/thoughts-on-movie-piracy) and the Storify plugin embeds the full story on-the-fly when the page is rendered. You can add additional content above and below this URL, just make sure it is on its own line.
You can see how this works on my recent Thoughts on Movie Piracy post which just uses my Storify link in the post body. By contrast, you can see the URL for this story in the previous paragraph and note that the story is not embedded because the link is within other content and not on a unique line.
Should I use Storify?
If you are a regular content producer and write long-form articles, discussion pieces, op-eds or any similar forms of piece, then I would recommend starting a Storify account and publishing on that platform also. You don’t (and shouldn’t) post everything in both your blog and on Storify as there will be some pieces that fit best in one or other of the platforms.