In one of his recent pieces, “Purple Text, Orange Highlights,” Gigi (npub1der…xzpc) points out:
This is exactly what the Highlighter tool by PABLOF7z (npub1l2v…ajft) helps nostriches do: curate and transmit information. It allows us to share, zap, and comment the quotes you find valuable. These quotes are then discoverable on https://highlighter.com/ and interoperable with a plethora of Nostr apps. A Pablo puts it, Highlighter is:
a way of keeping the words you find valuable running on Nostr
Highlighter offers three approaches to curating information:
via web interface (console)
with the Highlighter (npub1w0r…cu4x) bot
using a browser extension
Web
The web interface is quite self explanatory and provides the best functionality. All you need to do is:
1 Open the 🔍Console tab and enter the URL to the article that has a piece you’d like to highlight
2 Enter the author’s npub – that way they will receive a share of zaps, collected by the highlight
3 Click Load
4 You can now highlight the bits of the page you’ve been redirected to:
(1) Tap the lightning button to summon the menu
(2) Highlight desired text
(3) Tap the pencil icon
(4) Confirm your intention with your Nostr browser extension
5 See your highlight appear. It is now a Nostr event, which you, or any other nostrich can (1) zap, (2) repost and/or (3) comment. The highlight also provides a (4) link to the original web page and (5) to itself.
Bot
Alternatively, you can tag Highlighter (npub1w0r…cu4x) bot in the Nostr client of your choice and provide it with a link to the article you’d like to highlight something in. Just like neo (npub1lyq…hj2g) did here: nevent1q…9fvp
The Bot will reply with a link to a page that will allow you to do so. A similar experience to the one the web app provides.
Extension
This is by far the most convenient (though a bit tricky to set up) way to use Highlighter. Unfortunately, Google is acting up at the moment, so the process of enabling the extension requires a few extra steps.
While there is still hope that Pablo will manage to make the process easier for fellow nostriches…
… I will explain the process to those who want to start sharing wisdom with the community right away:
1 Visit https://highlighter.com/#how and tap the Chrome Extension button. I’ll be using Google Chrome, but it will work on any Chromium-based browser
2 Don’t freak out when redirected to a GitHub page 😁. Tap Code (1) and choose Download Zip (2)
3 Unpack the downloaded .zip file
4 Open chrome://extensions/ in your chrome browser (replace with brave://extensions/ if you’re using Brave)
5 Enable Developer mode (1) and tap Load unpacked (2) in the top left corner
6 Select the unpacked folder you’ve downloaded from Pablo’s GitHub page
7 Voilà! You can now highlight the pieces you like on any website you visit. Simply tap the extension, and follow the same process you would with the web approach.
There are two things I’ve gotta point out:
extension does not yet allow adding the author’s npub, so all zaps will be sent to the nostrich who highlighted the text.
you must have a NIP-07 extension set up in order to use Highlighter extension – this is the only way you can seamlessly approve your intention to broadcast a highlight.
An error message you will receive when trying to use Highlighter without having a NIP-07 extension
Perspectives
There’s so much that can be added to this initiative – just like most other things on Nostr, Highlighter is open source, hence it’s development is only limited to the imagination, skill and determination of the Nostr community. We are yet to see what this potential leap in adoption of Value-4-Value movement may bring us, meanwhile let’s start highlighting the most brilliant ideas by the greatest minds we can find to help our loved ones find signal in the ocean of noise.
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