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(Almost) Embedding Feeds in a Hosted Wordpress Blog Post...

One of the stumbling blocks I've come up against with Wordpress is the inability to embed Grazr widgets, or even better, javascript, in the body of a post using the hosted Wordpress servce.

One short term workaround is to embed an image representation of the feed, e.g. using the RSS2image service:

It strikes me that I've explored workarounds to this before, way back when, for example in They Stole OUr Learning Environment - Now We're Stealing It Back and Adding a Grazr Widget to a Moodle Journal Page

In those cases, the trick was to use a Greasmonkey script - or a bookmarklet - to scan the page for a particular HTML element ID and then inject a widget into the page at that location.

By parsing the contents of an element - for example, extracting the URL pointed to from a link via the element's href attribute - the injected widget/code can re-present the content.

In the above RSS2image case, it would be possible to pull out the feed URL from the link that encloses the image, and replace the image with the embedded live feed.

(It would be easier for tinkering if the rss2image service actually allowed you to call an image by feed url - e.g. http://rss2image.com?url=http://feed.example.com/foo/bar It would also be handy if you could control the size of the image, and maybe a little bit more of what's displayed? A version for twitter would accept the full character limit, and a version for delicious might display the link title, description, and a tiinyurl reference to the bookmarked page itself?*)

The problem remains, though, that this is a client side fix, and so beyond what's appropriate for the majority of users.

*picking up on that, I wonder if this library offers a quick way in to such a tool? How to Embed Your Twitter Status in You Ustream, which links to a PHP library that egnerates an image from a twitter stream...

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Tags: greasemonkey, bookmarklet, wordpress

Posted by ajh59 at March 11, 2008 11:46 AM