New Dinghy site part 5 – creating bookmarks

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Hey everyone, it's Nils from Dinghy Studio. In today's episode of our series on building our new website, I'm excited to introduce a new convenience tool we've developed.

We've been using our Sanity CMS to manage structured content, and we've now added a bookmarks collection. This feature arose from our team's habit of sharing interesting links in our knowledge-sharing channel. While this was great for internal sharing, we identified two issues: the links would get lost in the stream over time, and we wanted a way to share these great finds more broadly, without the need to write extensive blog posts. Think of it as a form of micro-blogging.

You can see these "Links We Love" on the sidebar of our blog – it's a small but significant addition. To make sharing these links super convenient for the team, we didn't want everyone to log into Sanity each time. So, I developed a simple tool – a form that any team member can use to quickly add a new bookmark directly to Sanity.

This tool captures essential details like title, description, URL, image, and tags from our existing tags collection. As a demonstration, I found a fantastic page by Caroline Peron featuring beautiful sports illustrations. Using our tool, I easily added this link to our bookmarks. When pasting the URL, the tool automatically fetches the social sharing image and other relevant metadata.

After filling in a title, a brief description, and tagging it under 'Human Connections', I added the link. It immediately appeared in our Sanity CMS and on our website's sidebar, formatted nicely. This process was incredibly smooth and efficient.

Looking ahead, I see potential for further automation, like integrating a feature to simultaneously post these bookmarks on LinkedIn or other social media channels. This idea of structured content and auto-publishing is fascinating, and I'm excited to explore these possibilities in future videos.

I hope you found this insight into our approach to structured content and publishing interesting. Let me know your thoughts , and stay tuned for more updates on how we're leveraging these tools at Dinghy.