Keep track of any resources you use over the lifecycle of your stories, and easily share links to those resources with your story collaborators.
Over the course of planning, drafting, writing, styling, promoting, and monitoring an individual story it is likely that you will utilise some online resources. These may be documents that contain your story outline or draft, planning tools, other stories used for inspiration, image lightboxes, communication channels, social-media tracking etc.
The resource links feature allows for a list of those links to be easily accessible from the story cards on your Shorthand dashboard, and from directly within the Shorthand editor. You can create and edit an individual list for any story.
To create a list of links for a story, click on a story card on the dashbaord and choose "Resources" from the pop-up menu. Then just type or paste in a link to any online document or service and give your link a descriptive name. An icon will be automatically applied.
Adding links from the dashboard
You can also create and manage a list from within the story editor by clicking on the word "RESOURCES" at the top of the screen.
The list is the same whether created or accessed from the dashboard or the story editor.
Each list is available to, and able to be edited by, any collaborator on the story. In this way, even collaborators that aren't editing the story in Shorthand can still access and add links to the list. If you collaborate with a large team, then resource links can be used to ensure that everyone has a single view of important links for the story. For example, if you are responsible for creating a story in Shorthand, you may wish to add links to story drafts and your research notes, while a designer on the team could add links to online folders of prepared images for the story. That way, when you are in the story editor, you can easily find the content you need while creating. On the dashboard, your marketing department could add links to the tools they use to promote the story or monitor it on social channels. If your team uses online communication tools to discuss and plan stories, they could even link to channels in those tools.
The links aren't published with your story. Your readers won't see them. They are for you and your collaborators only. Be aware that all links are available to be seen, edited, and deleted by anyone that can see the story on their Shorthand dashboard.
To use or manage story resource links, open the panel. On mouseover each link will show options to visit (the link will open in a new browser tab), edit (change its name or link), and delete.
Managing story resources
If you make a copy of story that has resource links, the links are also copied to the new story and will then act as an independent list.