Ben Pickles. Saying stuff about stuff.

Shortwave Gist

I’ve been using Shortwave for a while, it’s lightweight (a bookmarklet) and particularly agreeable as it syncs with my iPhone. Today I finally tired of having to look through the git docs site and decided to create a custom Shortwave commands file.

In an inspired move I’m storing it in a Gist for easy access and maintainability – I simply point Shortwave to the raw version.

It makes me wonder what else I could store in that there tinterweb…

Of course the downside of this is that Shortwave has to parse the file on each request and github isn’t exactly fast.

P.S. Here’s the Git docs command I added:

git  http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-%s.html  Git command help.

Posted on 5 January 2009

What is oEmbed and why is it useful?

From the oEmbed site ¹:

oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites.

Cool… what?

For example Vimeo will return the HTML required to embed one of its videos – oEmbed is particularly useful for videos ².

http://vimeo.com/api/oembed.xml?url=http://www.vimeo.com/935317


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<oembed>
  <type>video</type>
  <version>1.0</version>
  <provider_name>Vimeo</provider_name>
  <provider_url>http://vimeo.com/</provider_url>
  <title>Weird Fishes: Arpeggi</title>
  <author_name>flight404</author_name>
  <author_url>http://vimeo.com/flight404</author_url>
  <is_plus>1</is_plus>
  <html><![CDATA[<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="504" height="348" data="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=935317&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;fullscreen=1&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=1&amp;color=00ADEF">
  <param name="quality" value="best" />
  <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
  <param name="scale" value="showAll" />
  <param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=935317&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;fullscreen=1&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=1&amp;color=00ADEF" />
</object>]]></html>
  <width>504</width>
  <height>348</height>
  <duration>318</duration>
  <thumbnail_url>http://20.media.vimeo.com/d1/5/57/04/55/thumbnail-57045532.jpg</thumbnail_url>
  <thumbnail_width>160</thumbnail_width>
  <thumbnail_height>120</thumbnail_height>
  <clip_id>935317</clip_id>
</oembed>

Hidden away amongst the cruft you can see that the html element contains their movie player embed code.

Why?

Think bookmarks, tumbles and other such delights. It’s like a rich meta description – though that sounds awfully close to being a cringe-worthy marketing buzzword creating developer cynicism.

Resources

oEmbed – The official oEmbed site
Vimeo oEmbed API documentation
oohEmbed.com – Get oEmbed code for resources from non-oEmbed supporting sites

¹ Gotta love their ASCII art:


                         __                 __
                        /\ \               /\ \
  ___      __    ___ ___\ \ \____     __   \_\ \
 / __`\  /'__`\/' __` __`\ \ '__`\  /'__`\ /'_` \
/\ \L\ \/\  __//\ \/\ \/\ \ \ \L\ \/\  __//\ \L\ \
\ \____/\ \____\ \_\ \_\ \_\ \_,__/\ \____\ \___,_\
 \/___/  \/____/\/_/\/_/\/_/\/___/  \/____/\/__,_ /

 ===== because 'open embed' sounds too dirty =====

² One could argue that embedding videos is all it’s really useful for at the moment as it seems to be most popular among video services (not YouTube!) but that’s a discussion for another day.

Posted on 12 December 2008