Rogier Pennink

Making your web service embeddable

Introduction

One thing that keeps filling me with awe every time I reflect upon it, is how the world wide web has evolved over the past decade – and still keeps evolving. In March 2000, I was twelve: I didn’t have my own computer and the only computer I had access to was on dial-up. I believe we had a 28.8k modem, and that just about allowed me to load altavista in search of cheatcodes for Sim City 2000 or C&C 1.

I type this as I sit behind my custom-built PC, 23″ widescreen monitor (while wishing I had a second one), with an iPhone in my pocket that alerts me of facebook notifications faster than the browser I also have facebook opened in. The editor I use is powered by javascript and automatically saves what I write as I write it. In the meantime I am listening to music from a youtube video that was embedded on a different website while also browsing two other websites on which I’m logged in with my facebook and twitter accounts respectively. Admittedly, this is a bit of a cheap write-up and certainly not the first one at that, but the underlying thought here is that many of the above web services are no longer confined to their own domain and have become more and more interconnected.

For this post, I’m going to look only at what I’d dub the most basic form of embedding: the ‘coppy-and-paste-this-html-into-your-website’ method, or so to speak. The sample project to which I will refer throughout this post is the Digillusions website on which I included the ability for users to embed polls into their own websites. For good measure, I’ve included a poll below to prove that what I’m talking about actually works. If an image is worth a thousand words, a live sample must surely be worth a hundred times that.

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