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May 17, 2020

Embedded Media: Twitter, NPR, SoundCloud

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You can use the same HTML view to embed all kinds of dynamic content inside Blogger posts. You can include iframe content, and you can also include javascripts (being able to include javascripts is one of the key factors in my choice of Blogger as a free/ad-free blogging platform: Why I Use Blogger).

In this post, I'll list some of the other kinds of embedded media I include in blog posts, especially in my daily class announcements. There are literally hundreds of websites that provide dynamic content that you can embed, and once you get comfortable with copying-and-pasting the code into your blog posts, all of that content is just waiting for you to use it!

Twitter tweets

You can embed individual tweets in a blog post, and this is definitely desirable when that tweet contains some kind of embedded media itself, like a video. For example, my students really enjoyed this Minecraft version of our campus. Here's a link to the tweet, and here's the tweet embedded:


To embed a tweet,  just click on the down-arrow menu in the upper-right corner of any tweet and choose embed.


You can copy the code as is, or you can customize it; I usually customize it by opting out of the replies and the tailoring.

Twitter widgets

 You can also embed an actual Twitter account so that the most current content is at the top. For example, here is our student newspaper, the OU Daily:


To embed a Twitter account like that, just go to Publish.Twitter.com and choose the options there. There are lots of widget options available!

NPR audio

 I often will hear something on NPR that I want to share with the students. Sometimes I do that just as a link, but you can also embed NPR audio. You'll see the link when that is available on the NPR page, with the usual <> symbol:


So, for example, here is an inspiring interview with Jerry Saltz:


SoundCloud audio

SoundCloud also has some great embedding features:


Here's a Karsh Kale song I really like: Hallelujah- Ode To A Sunny Day


Those are just a few ideas. If you start poking around you will probably find lots of examples of dynamic multimedia content you can embed in your blog posts, and you can teach your student how to embed all this multimedia in their blog posts too, sharing the media long with their own comments and thoughts about it.


Next up....... editing existing posts! (Short version: it's easy!)



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