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How to embed an Are.na channel using an `iframe` in HTML

A friend got in touch recently about using this WordPress theme, asking if it would be possible to integrate support for Are.na channels in the theme. I suggested that it’s probably out of scope for the theme but could be great as a plugin that integrates the Are.na API, definitely something I’d be interested in making. Started thinking about how it might work best, wanted to keep it relatively simple and such since ideally I’d want it to work with classic WP and Gutenberg.

Turns out, I was way overcomplicating it. I mentioned the plugin idea to Sam and he suggested just doing an iframe embed like they do on the lovely Are.na blog. Of course! 🤦🏻‍♀️

I’d still like to explore the plugin idea at some point since it would offer a few more opportunities (see things to consider about embeds below, particularly the fact that Are.na embed support is undocumented), but this seems like a nice way of doing it in the meantime.

Example below of Gemma’s Internet Explorers channel as an embed:

How it works

This is the embed code for that particular iframe:

<iframe style="border:none;" width="100%" height="590" src="https://www.are.na/gemma-copeland/internet-explorers/embed" title="Gemma Copeland’s Are.na channel “Internet Explorers”"></iframe>

If you’re less familiar with HTML, here’s what’s going on.

The opening and closing HTML tags <iframe></iframe> stand for an Inline Frame element. This type of element nests a separate resource like a webpage on to the page you’re currently looking at. It contains the attributes style, width, height, src, and title to modify the way it behaves.

Since many browsers render an iframe with a border by default, we’re using the style attribute to get rid of the border on this iframe. You can also style HTML elements with classes and CSS, but we’re using this technique, known as inline styles, for simplicity’s sake.

The width and height attributes specify—you guessed it—the width and height of the iframe. If you were missing either of these attributes, the iframe would collapse. According to the standards, these values should both be set as integers which the browser interprets as pixels. That said, browsers seem to be able to interpret a 100% width correctly, meaning that it fills 100% of the width of its container. If you want to stick to standards, you could add a high width value and then add max-width:100%; to your inline styles.

The src or “source” attribute tells the browser what content you want to embed. Without it, you’d just have an empty iframe. The URL we’re using here is exactly the same as the URL for Gemma’s actual Internet Explorers channel (https://www.are.na/gemma-copeland/internet-explorers), with the addition of /embed on the end. If you try visiting this URL, https://www.are.na/gemma-copeland/internet-explorers/embed, you’ll see that it is essentially a stripped-down version of the original Channel page that is more suitable for embedding.

The title attribute indicates the contents of the iframe. It can be important for accessibility since some screen readers will use it.

Things to consider before embedding content on your site

There are a few things worth keeping in mind if you decide to try this. These notes apply to any embedded content, regardless of where it’s coming from.

1. An iframe embeds the tracking and cookie behavior of its source, not just its contents

When you embed another webpage on your site with an iframe, it will behave the exact same way as if you had visited the source website. In other words, that website may collect data about your visitors, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, or monitor your visitors’ interaction with the embedded content.

You should be sure that you’re ok with this before including an embed on your site. Personally, this is one reason why I don’t use embeds very often.

I feel comfortable embedding an Are.na channel in this case because it’s for demonstration purposes, they adhere to the GDPR, and I’m satisfied by the way they handle data according to their privacy policy.

2. The accessibility of an iframe embed depends mostly on the source page

It’s recommended to add a title attribute to your embeds for better accessibility, but that’s pretty much where your accessibility control stops. If the source page hasn’t been built with accessibility in mind, it may be difficult to browse for people that use alternative ways to navigate the web.

Unfortunately, Are.na channel embed pages are missing accessibility features such as unique title elements, descriptive alt texts for the block images, and semantic elements such as <figure> or <figcaption>. This is kind of understandable though since these embed pages are an undocumented feature, something that they probably made more for their own use, and they’re no doubt focusing their main efforts on the public-facing product. Would love to see it tweaked though, particularly since they use these embeds on their own blog.

3. It’s nearly impossible to change the way an embed looks

There’s very little you can do to change the look of an embed. You can change the way the frame itself appears, like removing the default border as we’ve done in the example above, but you usually can’t change the contents of the embed.

Sometimes a platform will accept additional attributes or URL parameters that change an embed’s functionality. YouTube is an example, see their Player Parameters documentation. But this just changes the general functionality, it doesn’t allow you to actually change the placement of the play button or change the controls from red to blue. You can use some fiddly JavaScript to get things looking like you want, but it’s pretty hacky.

Instead, if you want to heavily customize the way that the embed contents look, you should probably integrate the content using the platform’s API if they offer it. This is what we did on Gemma’s site, using the Are.na API and Eleventy to add channels directly to her homepage. This content inherits her site’s styles, so it’s more in keeping with the look and feel of her site.

4. Embeds can break

Broken links are an ever-present problem on the web, people are always changing URLs and taking down content. A broken link is only noticeable if you click it, whereas a broken iframe can look pretty crap. If this would bother you, then you might want to be careful about how much embedded content you include on your site.

Besides this, the source website can restrict which domains are allowed to embed their content at any time. This is unlikely to happen with a platform like Vimeo or YouTube which offer embeds as a part of their advertised functionality. But with this Are.na channel embed for example, Are.na might decide that they only want to allow their embed pages to be embedded on their own site and change their Content-Security-Policy or X-Frame-Options HTTP response headers accordingly. And it’s their right to do so if they wish!

If you want to increase the likelihood that third-party content will be available on your site in the future, it’s best to use documented methods, ideally an API. If you integrate content via an API, you can craft a graceful error message in the event that the content doesn’t load. This can look a lot more forgiving than a broken embed.

5. Embeds probably won’t be crawled by search engine bots

This is… not a huge concern IMO. But I mention it since it may be a concern for others. Search engine bots don’t tend to crawl iframe contents, meaning that they won’t take that content in to account when determining what your page is all about. If this is super important to you, then use the platform’s API (if available) to integrate third-party content directly in to your site.

Edit at 2pm: Changed width description since 100% isn’t technically in line with standards, though it works.

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Disabling “save to Pinterest”

Just had a collaborator ask if we could disable the “save to Pinterest” button even if a visitor has a Pinterest addon / extension in their browser. My immediate reaction was “Maybe? I’d think not but will see!”

Turns out something like this should be possible. Pinterest supports disabling saves from a site, see their documentation. You can either enable it site-wide or per image.

I’m surprised but really happy to see that they offer this, hope that they continue to do so.

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Single `mv` command to change all filenames in directory to lower case and replace spaces

This is the mv command I use to change all of the filenames in my current directory from mixed case to lowercase and replace spaces with underscores.

for file in *; do mv "$file" `echo $file | tr ' ' '_' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`  ; done

The ; semicolons indicate the end of each line of this command. To break it down:

  1. for file in * loops over all the files in the directory. You could change the * wildcard to something like *.jpg if you wanted to only target JPG files.
  2. do mv "$file" instructs the system to move each file in the loop to the location that immediately follows.
  3. `echo $file | tr ' ' '_' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'` is the location we’re moving the file to. We use the tr “translate” command to replace spaces with underscores, and then again (separated by the | pipe character) to replace uppercase letters with lowercase letters. Then we echo that translated filename.
  4. done lets the system know that the loop is done.

I use this occasionally to prep files for use on the web when working on a static site, one that isn’t hooked it up to a CMS.

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Thoughts on LAMP vs JAMstack content management systems

Chris Coyier recently published a CSS-Tricks post titled “WordPress and Jamstack”. It’s a great rundown of the pros and cons, and I’m in agreement on the whole.

The most important point for my own use cases is from the section titled “CMS and End User UX”.

Sometimes, we developers are building sites just for us (I do more than my fair share of that), but I’d say developers are mostly building sites for other people. So the most important question is: am I building something that is empowering for the people I’m building it for?

I really enjoy working on JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, Markup) sites, the dev environment can be spectacular. It’s wonderful to not worry about deployment, HTTPS, caching. BUT. I haven’t yet found a JAMstack content management system (CMS) that I love, so it’s not something I feel super comfortable reaching for in the majority of my client work.

Read more

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Now online: Open-weather

Screenshot of the Open-weather website showing a storm over Japan

open-weather.community

The Open-weather website is online. A bit about Open-weather:

Open-weather is a project by Sophie Dyer and Sasha Engelmann probing the noisy relationships between bodies, atmospheres and weather systems through experiments in amateur radio, open data and feminist tactics of sensing and séance.

The site is pretty straightforward, a static hub for a bunch of resources hosted in various places including their PublicLab wiki and archive of amateur radio-generated weather data. The homepage is currently a large scrollable nowcast produced in collaboration by people across the globe. We decided to embed the Google Sheet archive directly in the site for now, though that may change in the future. We may do the same for pages such as methodology, to come later on. We’ll see!

The site is hosted on Netlify and the code is in a GitLab repo. Pls excuse sub-par commit messages and the very minimal README.

Sasha and Sophie are giving a talk at 14:30 UTC-4 Toronto as part of Our Networks distributed festival. Definitely worth grabbing a ticket, it’s super well priced considering how much Our Networks is putting on and absolutely worth supporting that org.

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Removing whitespace from around an SVG in Inkscape

For future reference, this is how to remove whitespace from around an SVG in Inkscape according to the version I’m running right now (1.0beta2):

Open up the SVG in Inkscape, then select all elements in the SVG (cmd+A). Click File in the top toolbar menu, then Document Properties. The dialogue box should open to the Page settings. Under “Orientation”, click the drop-down arrow “Resize page to content”, then click the button “Resize page to drawing or selection”.

I used to use Adobe Creative Cloud for loads of stuff but got rid of it a few months ago. It’s just so crazy expensive, and I never need it for client work anymore. Almost all of the designers I work with hand over Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD prototypes nowadays, and I’m happy using Affinity for personal stuff (Photo for image editing, Publisher for a never-ending cookbook project, etc.).

BUT. I do sometimes have to manipulate SVG icon exports that have excess white space. Previously I used Adobe Illustrator to sort that out, now I use Inkscape. I use it so rarely though that I have no muscle memory, I always forget how to crop to the edges of an SVG to get rid of that whitespace. Now I won’t forget, fingers crossed.

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Decentering Whiteness in Design History, an annotated bibliography in progress

Check out Decentering Whiteness in Design History, an annotated bibliography in progress.

One of the great FemOS ladies shared the above resource recently. She came across it via the Simply Secure Slack chat. It seems like a strong doc, I hope that the researchers and others continue to add to it.

If you’re looking for resources on a particular topic like typography or graphic design, it’s best to refer to their hashtag list currently on page 8 (search the doc for “Hashtag Authority List” if it moves). Then find a tag you’re interested in and search the doc for that tag.

Below is a list of a few resources that caught my eye and I’d like to follow up on. These are all freely available online in one form or another or could likely be loaned from a library.

  • “The Font that Never Was: Linotype and the “Phonetic Chinese Alphabet” of 1921”, an article by Thomas S. Mullaney. The article is behind a paywall, but he also presented it at ATypI 2016 (see video).
  • Saki Mafundikwa’s TED talk Ingenuity and elegance in ancient African alphabets
  • Chromophobia by David Batchelor published in 2001. The editorial description: “The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse—a fear of corruption or contamination through colour—lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge colour, either by making it the property of some ‘foreign body’—the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological—or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic.” Purchase from the publisher, buy it secondhand, or look for it at local library.
  • “New Blackface: Neuland and Lithos as Stereotypography”, an essay by Rob Giampietro that was originally published in the journal of the Type Directors Club (an org that has been been in hot water over the past few months, incidentally…). It’s available to read on his website.
  • Design in California and Mexico 1915–1985, the catalogue for the exhibition “Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico 1915–1985” at LACMA in 2018. Purchase from the LACMA online store, buy it secondhand. Feel like this is unlikely to be in a local library unfortunately.
  • “Violence and Economic Growth: Evidence from African American Patents, 1870–1940” by Lisa Cook, published in the Journal of Economic Growth in June 2014. Cook analyzed over two million patents, cross-referencing with Census records to track Black patent activity over time. From the bibliography: “Her data suggested something huge happened after 1921 that caused the rate of Black patenting to tank after that date; it turned out to be the destruction of “Black Wall Street” during the Tulsa massacre.” Available in full as a PDF via Cook’s website.

Time to reintroduce a whole lot of color on this site, I think!

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Open source tools for multi-source and cross-format academic publishing

I’m working with Sasha Engelmann and Sophie Dyer on the Open Weather platform, an archive and learning resource related to NOAA satellite 🛰 imagery. Sasha just shared a few open source publication tools that were brought to her attention by a friend and fellow artist at her Akademie Schloss Solitude residency, wanted to add them here for further research and future reference.

Manifold: A platform for publishing academic texts online

Manifold is a free “intuitive, collaborative, open-source platform for scholarly publishing”. See their repo on GitHub.

Manifold powers the Fembot Collective including Ada, Fembot’s journal on gender, new media, and technology. Looks like Fembot has been working with Manifold since about a year ago when the platform launched their pilot. Read Ada 16: Emerging Gender, Media and Technology Scholarship in Africa.

It looks pretty cool (and so does Fembot + Ada!). Manifold can bring together a whole lot of different methods of writing such as Epub, Markdown, HTML, and Google Docs. Hence the name Manifold, I guess. This is incredibly useful when bringing the work of different researchers together. Also makes it clear to me that good markup in writing is so worth it.

Manifold wants to make a digital book much more than just a screen version of a physical book, something that can easily fold in explorations, supplements, and other resources that augment the main text. It also incorporates annotation and discussion settings to keep the conversation going.

I’d love to see a book that really heavily uses the platform’s unusual features. Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames is a featured project that’s worth a look. The chapters are punctuated with metagames they’ve created that you can download and install.

As a reader, I feel that the typography lets it down a bit. I found it hard to read, particularly on larger screens. A slightly narrower maximum width to the main text column would help a lot. Losing the justification and greater paragraph indentations would help too. Manifold does have some theme options, but it doesn’t involve control over the typography.

If your priorities are bringing together content from a wide arrange of sources, incorporating the work of disparate researchers with varying levels of technical abilities, and relative ease of setup (the documentation seems comprehensive), then Manifold seems like an incredible tool. If you need to retain any control over the design though or if you also want print publishing tools, it might not be the right fit for the job.

And probably worth mentioning: I think you’d need at least a bit of technical know-how to get this set up safely and securely. Probably worth getting in touch with Manifold directly if you’re an org since they’re still in beta.

B-ber: A tool for single-source, cross-format, design-conscious publishing

Triple Canopy is a magazine that “resists the atomization of culture”. They’re responsible for b-ber, a tool for single-source, cross-format, design-conscious publishing. Here’s how they describe it in the b-ber GitHub repo:

b-ber is both a method and an application for producing publications in a variety of formats—EPUB 3, Mobi/KF8, static website, PDF, and XML file, which can be imported into InDesign for print layouts—from a single source that consists of plain-text files and other assets. b-ber also functions as a browser-based EPUB reader, which explains the name.

Their text introducing b-ber “Working on our thoughts”—title from the Nietzche quote “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts” according to the footnotes—is a good read, explains the impetus and a bit about the ups and downs of how it evolved.

B-ber can only consume one input, an extended form of Markdown. This makes it more limited than Manifold in that regard, but the output options are substantial. It’s particularly strong for the design-conscious, the fact that you can import to InDesign and easily theme the browser-based EPUB reader is pretty fantastic. This is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for back when I was working at Occasional Papers!

The reading experience of the default b-ber theme (or whichever they use on their post) is nicer than Manifold in my opinion, it’s just a lot easier to read. There are some snags, but I imagine you could resolve these in a custom theme. Related to that, see their repository of b-ber demos and b-ber theme starter.

It’s definitely worth following the development of this project if you’re in to digital publishing. Their announcement post was published back in December, not very long ago! Excited to see how it develops.

As with Manifold, I think you’d need a reasonable amount of technical knowledge to get this set up. Since it seems to be more of an internal Triple Canopy tool that they’ve kindly made open source for wider use, they probably wouldn’t be able to provide as much support as Manifold might be able to. (This is just a guess though!)

My experience

Though I’ve been tempted, I’ve never built something that was meant to have a digital bookish-ness, everything I’ve developed has had online-first layouts and components in mind. Some sites have had fairly extensive print styles, but that’s usually as far as it goes.

The most common related problem I’ve run in to on sites with long-format academic writing is footnotes. I’ve never come across a CMS that handles footnotes well. Heck, even HTML doesn’t handle them all that well, there aren’t any appropriate semantic elements as far as I’m aware (though there were in HTML3?).

The only easily accessible markup system that works with footnotes AFAIK is extended Markdown syntax. To use extended Markdown on a client site though, A) I have to be sure that the client is on board with learning quite a bit of Markdown (they often are once they understand the benefit, but some are stubborn!), and B) it needs to be compatible with whatever layout system the designer has devised.

I used this approach a while ago on the Jock Kinneir Library site, as of right now they’re using footnotes on the Biography page.

This implementation wasn’t super straightforward since the site couldn’t use a single Markdown field for content, we needed more of a page builder to accomplish the layout. Because of that, I had to do some trickery to recompile the footnotes at the base of the page content as opposed to after each text section. Honestly I can’t 100% remember how I accomplished it… It’s on Craft so uses Twig templates, and I don’t think we had the time to make a custom module that would take advantage of server-side logic. I do remember that it was a bit hackier than I wanted, but it safely accomplished what needed to be done.

If I need to include footnotes or something similar in the future, I’ll probably refer to this comprehensive article on footnotes, endnotes, and sidenotes (via @s3ththompson).

Would be curious if others have come across similar free, open source tools, or if anyone knows of work being done on the HTML spec to get some progress with footnotes.

At any rate, all of the above just reinforces my opinion that anyone who writes, regardless of how tech-savvy, should learn how to write in Markdown at minimum, ideally the extended syntax. If your archive of writing is in a machine-readable format, you’re miles ahead should you ever wish to publish it somewhere remotely digital or want to convert it to an IDML file or something similar.

Edit 24 September 2020: Added link to article about sidenotes.

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Command to delete all `node_modules` directories

How to delete all node_modules directories from your computer

Sam just pointed out this article, so useful! I ran the command to check how much space my node_modules folders are taking up, it’s 6.2G in total. Probably more on my external drives. Not necessary for sites I haven’t touched in quite a while (particularly since I’m still trying to keep my old laptop kicking…).