How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website or Blog

Learn how to embed almost anything in youHTML web pages from Flash

videos to Spreadsheets to high resolution photographs to static images from Google Maps and more.

Embed RSS Feeds in Web Pages

Go to this page,

replace the feed URL with your own feed, use the default color scheme

or change it to something else and then click Get Code. You’ll

get a JavaScript snippet that can be easily placed in the sidebar of

your blog.

If you like to embed feeds from multiple sources, merge all of them into one using Yahoo Pipes and then pass the combined feed to the Google Gadget. You can also use RSS widgets like WidgetBox or YourMinis that are done in Flash and not JavaScript.

Embed High Quality or HD YouTube Videos

To embed a high resolution version of YouTube clip in your web

pages, first make sure that “Watch in High Quality” or

“Watch in HD” link exists next to the YouTube player as

most videos are only available in standard format.

Next copy the YouTube embed code and append &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 (for high quality) or &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 (for 720p High Definition) to the URL value of the movie parameter in both instances (see YouTube HD example).

Embed MP3 music and other Audio

If you like to embed audio files like songs, podcasts or interviews in your web pages use Yahoo! Media Player

- its a free Flash music player that automatically detects all links to

MP3 files in the current web page and turns them into a music

player.  Another alternative is the Google MP3 Player.

To embed other audio formats like 3GP, Midi, Real or Windows Media,

it may be a good idea to convert these files into MP3 using Zamzar so

that they play on almost any web browser.

Embed Flickr Photos and Slideshows

To embed an individual Flickr photograph in your blog, click the

“Share This” link (available next to the photo title) and choose embed

it. Flickr requires that the embedded image should link back to Flickr

and this built-in embed option automatically takes care of that

requirement. (see example)

To embed a Flickr photo slideshow in your web page, open any Slideshow in a new page (see example) and choose “Customize HTML” from the embed option (see example). Here you can specify a custom size for your Flash slideshow so that it fits just right into your web page.

Embed Picasa Web Albums

When you open a photo album inside Picasa, click the link in the

right sidebar that says “Link to this album” and choose “Embed

Slideshow”. You can use the same approach to embed individual

photographs that are available inside Picasa.

Embed Events from Google Calendar

Click the drop-down arrow next to any Google Calendar and select

Calendar settings. Open the Google Embeddable Calendar Helper program

by clicking the customize button and choose elements that you want to

display or hide in the calendar.

Embed Very Large Photographs

To embed really large images in your blog, you may either use Deep Zoom or the Google Maps viewer.

These programs break your photographs in small tiles and you can even

pan / zoom across these images very similar to the default interface of

Google Maps.

Embed Charts and Graphs in Web Pages

My personal favorite is Zoho Sheet – any chart created inside

Zoho Sheet can be published as an external image without exposing the

full spreadsheet. If you are interested in creating charts with low

volume of data, use Google Charts.

Embed GIF Animations and Screencasts

GIF animations (see example)

are a perfect way to embed short screencasts in web pages as they

require no plugins and auto-play inside feed readers. You should upload

GIF files to your Flickr account as it preserve all the frames while

lot of other image hosting website will drop anything after the first

frame.

Embed Chat in your Blog

If you like to chat with visitors who are currently on your site, get the chat widget from Meebo Me

and place it in the sidebar of your website. Visitors show up in your

Meebo buddy list so you can strike up a conversation, answer questions,

or just keep tabs on guests. Also see some more options to embed chat in blogs.

Embed Word Documents

Upload your document to Scribd

and they’ll give you the embed code in Flash. Scribd supports

both doc and the new Office 2007 docx format in addition to Open Office

documents.

Even Barack Obama is using Scribd to upload his public documents and upcoming plan.

Embed PowerPoint Presentations

While the popular choice is Slideshare, you should also consider using Issuu (best web application) for presentations that are either large or formatted in the form of magazines or catalogues (see example). The only downside is that Issuu accepts PDFs so you need to convert the presentation before uploading onto Issuu.

Embed Spreadsheet Data

Both Zoho Sheet and Google Docs

allow you to publish a range of cells from a spreadsheet into a web

page but the embedding process in Zoho is less complicated – select a

range and choose “Publish” from the contextual menu to embed that range

into your web page.

Embed Adobe PDF Files

To embed PDFs in a web page, you can either use Issuu (for magazine

style PDFs) or Scribd for PDFs has either have lot of text or have a

top-to-bottom reading layout similar to Word documents.

Embed Flash (SWF) or Flash Video (FLV)

The best option to embed Flash content is via swfobject.

It improves the overall user experience by providing alternatives in

case Flash is missing and your Flash content also becomes more

searchable. This tutorial has all the files and other details to help you get started with SwfObject 2.

Related: How to Embed FLV Flash Videos

Embed LinkedIn Profile

If you wish to display your LinkedIn profile in the sidebar of your blog, try LinkInABox. People (site visitors) can read a summary of your LinkedIn profile without leaving the site.

Embed Google Maps in Web Pages

Embedding a Google Map in your website is now almost as easy as adding an image – just open the Static Maps

wizard, search for location that you want to embed and specify the

dimensions of your map. They’ll provide a simple URL that

actually points to a static image of that map.

Embed Another Webpage in your Blog

If you like to embed another website into your web page, your best bet is an IFRAME

tag also known as an Inline Frame. Just set the SRC value to the

address of the web page that you want to embed into your current HTML

document. You could try IFRAMEs for inserting live search results from

Google into your web page without having to worry about APIs.

Embed Windows Media or QuickTime movies

While it is possible to embed mov or wmv videos in web pages directly using the OBJECT tag, I recommend that you put these videos onto blip.tv

and then embed them in web pages as Flash video.  That’s

because your visitors can then play the video without extra plugins and

two, they always have the option to download the video in the original

format from blip.tv servers.

Embed Other Fonts in Web Pages

Most web pages use universal fonts like Arial, Times New Roman or

Verdana since they are installed on most computers and hence your web

pages will render correctly. If you want to try something different and

render pages in fonts like Microsoft Calibri or Adobe Garamond Pro that

are only available on some machines, all you need is sIFR

– it lets you use almost any font for your web pages using

JavaScript + Flash and is perfect for writing “newspaper

style” headlines.

Embed your Lifestream in a Web Page

You have a presence on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, Facebook,

Amazon and a dozen other online places. It can get really tough for

friends to track you at so many places so what you should do is create

an account at FriendFeed, import all the different services that you

use and then use the FriendFeed Badge to embed your lifestream activity on your main site. You can also create Lifestream with Google Reader.