Rejuvenated Pullquote, now for Facebook too

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Seven years after Pullquote launched, there’s STILL nothing out there that performs its handy functions so simply.

So we’ve been fixing bugs, upgrading hardware, and updating the code powering Pullquote’s Chrome extension. The original functionality remains free: quickly tweet a quote—with a swipe and two clicks—rather than flipping back and forth between tabs, paraphrasing text and copy/pasting a URL⁠. As a bonus, extension users can immediately locate a quote on a long page.

We apologize for neglecting Pullquote while building AdBiblio, Racery, and WhichWorksBest. They’re all solid and earning money. To ensure Pullquote is also supported going forward, we’re adding a Pullquote Pro package with extra features for power users. These extra features ($40/year or $4/month) include:

  • Pullquoting from multiple Twitter accounts,
  • scheduling a tweet,
  • shortening a Pullquote and adjusting its font or color,
  • filing and indexing quotes,
  • and⁠—our most requested feature⁠—quickly Pullquoting to Facebook! 

Again, you’re welcome to use Pullquote’s core “tweet a quote” functionality for free.  Please give us feedback about future improvements you’d like to see. You can get the extension here.

Want some good quotes on running?

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This blog post on virtual race site Racery is full of quotable nuggets on the psychological and physical benefits of running.  Here’s our favorite:

even on mediocre runs, I relearn life-lessons: When in doubt, run. The first step is hardest. Try new trails. Look up. Everything passes. Pick a goal and, when it’s closer, pick another. Relax your shoulders. Grinds bring glides. Embrace the burn. Say hello. Enjoy breathing.

New: Pullquote powers quote-centric newsletters

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If you’re a collector of quotes, factoids, info-nuggets and stats, Pullquote’s tagging functionality makes it easy to archive and retrieve all that cool stuff.

Now Pullquote is offering a way for you to share those gems with others and perhaps become famous within Pullquote’s ecosystem of quote fanatics.

Here’s what you need to know:

1) As an added benefit of using Pullquote to save and share quotes, other people now can subscribe to an e-mail update containing any quote you’ve assigned a specific tag to.

2) Likewise, you can get an e-mail when people you admire finds a specific quote. So, for example, you can get an e-mail when I tag a pullquote with “neurons,” a current fascination mine.  Or when Sean Hackbarth tags a quote with “politics.”

This functionality, which we’ve provisionally named Quotecast, replaces Twitter’s 5000 PSI fire hose and Facebook’s mysterious swirling content waterfall with an eye-dropper, doling out doses of exactly the right content once a day.  (Or less, if there’s no quotes tagged in a given do.)

3) Or you can subscribe to all of someone’s quotes.

4) Now here’s where it gets interesting for you, an early adopter of Pullquote’s tagging functionality. If you’re currently a Pullquote user, you’ll see that we’re recommending certain Pullquoter’s feeds. We’re doing this based on who does a particularly good job of tagging quotes… which means you could be a star as Pullquote grows.

So get to tagging, and we’ll put your feeds in our recommendations!

Check out our colorz!

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You may have noticed that Pullquote now sports a bunch of gorgeous new quote colors and fonts!  Hope you like ’em.

Meanwhile, our sister site RunwMe has shed its chrysalis and emerged as Racery, which powers real races on virtual routes, whether cycling, swimming, rowing, running or walking. Also some great virtual routes for training for 5ks, 10ks and half marathons! Perfect for friends who want to run together, businesses seeking to entertain their customers, charities without the people power to host a live race, and organizations wanting to use races and challenges to inspire wellness.

Murakami’s advice on business and writing: make (at least) a few customers very happy

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Before he became a novelist, Haruki Murakami ran a jazz bar in Tokyo.

In his book

    What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

, Murakami says what he learned there shaped his writing philosophy. In short, Murakami learned “you can’t please everybody.” But he takes that lesson to its logical extreme, which is to say: you CAN do well pleasing just a few people, as long as you do it extremely well. In Murakami’s words:

A lot of customers came to the bar. If one out of ten enjoyed the place and said he’d come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it the other way, it didn’t matter if nine out of ten didn’t like my bar. This realization lifted a weight off my shoulders. Still, I had to make sure that the one person who did like the place really liked it. In order to make sure he did, I had to make my philosophy and stance clear-cut, and patiently maintain that stance no matter what.

Successful writers, according to Murakami, require a nearly monastic isolation from nearby people, so the writer can focus on the reader:

I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing, no association with all the people around me. I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person, but with an unspecified number of readers. As long as I got my day-to-day life set so that each work was an improvement over the last, then many of my readers would welcome whatever life I chose for myself. Shouldn’t this be my duty as a novelist, and my top priority? … I can’t see my reader’s faces, so in a sense it’s a conceptual type of human relationship, but I’ve consistently considered this invisible, conceptual relationship to be the most important thing in my life.