Let's add some Web 2.0 content to a Mahara page, using the Embedly block:
- Create a new page in your http://foliofor.me portfolio. Switch to edit view and look under the External content heading. You will see that you have the Embedly block available:
- Drag the block onto your page as you would do with any other block in Mahara.
- You will see the options box pop up. You need to do a couple of things before you can fill these out. Sign up for a free Embedly API account, and find the URL of what you want to embed. Let's sign up.
- Visit https://app.embedly/pricing/free and fill out the form with your own details. With the free plan, you can embed 10,000 links per month — that should be plenty! Once you have signed up, you will see a page that shows you Your API Key. Leave this page open for now and you will come back to it later.
- Now, let's find some content to embed. Visit http://embedly/providers. This shows you all of the services that you are able to embed into a Mahara page. There are lots of them! They range from commonly used services such as Facebook and Flickr to the more obscure Ultra Kawaii and SmugMug.
- By hovering over each service, you can see which URL patterns are accepted. Let's try embedding a video from the SoundCloud — a music/audio sharing service. At the time of writing, these are the URL patterns that are accepted:
- So, you can embed from most locations on the SoundCloud website.
- Let's visit the SoundCloud website and choose an audio clip. Go to http://http://soundcloud.com/. I searched for music by one of my favorite bands — Fleet Foxes — and chose their track Helplessness Blues. I listened to the track and decided I would like to add it to my page about 21st Century American Folk Music.
- Copy the link of the audio URL, which in this case is http://soundcloud.com/subpop/fleet-foxes-helplessness-blues. A quick check against the URL patterns shows that this video is fine to embed because of http://soundcloud.com/*/*.
- Back to Mahara. Let's fill in the settings for Embedly. First paste the Embedly API Key that you found in step 4.
- Then paste the URL in the Content URL field for the content to embed.
- Next, decide if you would like to show content description — this is a little bit of auto generated text that gets displayed below the embed. Fill in the usual block title, description, and so on. Here are the options for the SoundCloud embed:
- That's all there is to it. You will see your content embedded in your Mahara page:
You just saw how to embed some content from the SoundCloud website into a Mahara page, using the Embedly blocktype.
Isn't that great? This opens up a whole world of possibilities for your Mahara pages. With so many different services to choose from, there's no longer any excuse for a text-only, bland Mahara page. Make it dynamic and interesting.
Let's have a look at a few ideas for the other services that you can embed and what they look like in a Mahara page.
This is an online radio service that serves up podcast and live streaming broadcasts. You can access content from a variety of talk categories, including comedy, technology, sport, politics, and business. Why not include a talk in your Mahara page to show you understand a topic or give weight to an argument?
Here is what the embed looks like, taken from a radio show by the comedian Dave Gorman:
SchoolTube (http://www.schooltube.com/), along with TeacherTube (http://www.teachertube.com/) is one of the most popular video resources out there dedicated solely for education. It hosts many videos from students and academics alike. You're sure to find something useful there.
There is a fun stop motion video, about lab safety, made using LEGO characters — http://www.schooltube.com/video/8abf3e870635c885a3d3/Lab-Safety. You can imagine this being useful in a chemistry induction class. This is what it looks like once embedded:
