CiteBite One thing that's harder than it should be on the interweb (and especially when blogging) is citation (linking to a specific bit of text) in order to direct your reader to the source of the citation or the exact part of the product spec or simply the funny quote.

If the author has gone to the trouble of adding an anchor tag to the specific item you want to link to then the world is easy, you just link to http://some.url/page.html#the_anchor and the world is good and you can cite content from the site to your hearts content, but if it's a random extract that page author had no way of knowing that you'd care about then it's a lot harder (also if it's a site that for some reason doesn't think people will ever cite it can be difficult).

Luckily CiteBite has the answer. Simply select the text you want to highlight on the page, the URL and give then to CiteBite (they have a bookmarklet and a Firefox extension to make that easier) and it generates a URL for you that you use instead of the direct link (similar to TinyURL and other services).

When a user follows the CiteBite URL they get taken to the destination page with the selected text highlighted so it's really easy to find. Apart from a discrete "shade" at the top of the page telling you that you were linked via CiteBite there's no interference with the result.

To see it in operation, follow this link....

I've noticed one or two pages suffer some slight CSS related interference when linked via CiteBite, but nothing really ugly so far (mostly positioning getting shifted by a couple of pixels) and clicking the "Turn CiteBite Shade Off" removes any interference.

I hope they don't need to go down the route of interstitial advertising, banner ads on the shade or anything naughty (like rewriting the destination page with their own ads) but I can't see how as this service becomes more popular they'll be able to sustain the service outside donations and/or a paid premium service