Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Embedly - for embedding anything on a...

Embedly - for embedding anything on a blog http://su.pr/9iD4t8

How to Use Embedly...

Embedly has libraries available for a host of different client and server-side web languages, including jQuery, Python, Ruby and PHP. For users who don’t want to mess with writing their own tool, Embedly has built its own JavaScript tag and WordPress plugin. Community-developed plugins for Drupal and Joomla also exist.

Since the WordPress plugin was developed by Embedly itself (and we use WordPress at Mashable), here’s a brief overview of how easy it is to use Embedly to bring rich content to your website.

Install the Embedly Plugin

The first step is to download and install the Embedly plugin. Activate the plugin and you can select what services you want to enable from the Embedly menu in the WordPress dashboard.

Embedly frequently updates its service list, and you can run an “update services” command to get access to more libraries.

Paste URLs Into Your Posts

The next step is to simply enter a URL on its own line into your posts or web pages. Each service has slightly different parameters for how URLs should be entered, but in general, the base URL is all that is needed.

To embed a Twitter status update, for instance, you just need to enter in the URL to that update. The Embedly API page has the parameters for each service supported by Embedly.

Enjoy Rich Media Embeds

The Tumblr support is one of my favorite features — simply entering the URL for a post will embed the content of that post. If it’s a photo, the photo is displayed; if it’s a video, you’ll see the video in its player, and so on.

On the Twitter end, Embedly’s Blackbird Pie implementation is a lot easier than any other method we have seen. The company even has basic support for Twitter Photos.

You can take a look at an example page I created using Embedly on one of my test blogs.