Frequently Asked Questions¶
Great minds think alike...if none of these answer your question(s) you can ask us at http://support.embed.ly
General¶
What is Embedly?¶
It is a solution that automatically converts posted links into embedded media on the fly. With its set of APIs, tools, and libraries you are able to create unique visual experiences by embedding videos, images, rich media, RSS entries, and article previews.
Why Embedly?¶
Conduciveness. Embedly is the easiest way to embed content. In less then 10 minutes you can embed content from hundreds of providers and generate rich previews for any URL on the web through one API.
Simplicity is the key benefit of Embedly. Here is a quote from one of our users.
If we weren’t using Embedly we’d have had to spend probably around a week of an engineer’s time to build something that gets the basic job done. It wouldn’t be nearly as good, we’d have to deal with constant bug fixes and we’d be paying Amazon $200-$300 a month to host it anyway. Using Embedly is a no-brainer.
James Patterson Platform Lead at Yammer
We take care of all the logic for retrieving information about URLs, traversing html, making API calls to hundreds of providers, processing RSS feeds, checking the URLs against malware lists, and validating all the information.
Don’t spend weeks or months building a complex system, then hours every week maintaining it. Let Embedly handle the content while you focus on making your site or app great!
Am I paying for content?¶
No. You aren’t paying for content, you are paying for the use of Embedly’s processing engine.
How fast is Embedly?¶
Making an http request is inherently slow, so we can only be as fast as the URL we are resolving. However, Embedly uses a number of tools to make this process as expedient as possible.
Caching - Take advantage of being a part of the Embedly network. The first time we see a URL we will resolve the URL and put it into cache. Subsequent requests are served from cache. We invalidate requests daily, if not sooner depending on the http response code.
Parallel Processing - Once we have resolved the initial URL we process the API calls, image parsing, and malware detection in parallel. This greatly reduces the processing time.
Batch Processing - Send up to 20 URLs at a time to Embedly. We will process them all in parallel greatly improving performance.
Where can I find a demo of Embedly in action?¶
If you are using new Twitter, the Parrotfish plugin was built using the Preview API. You can also check out what our customers have been building.
API¶
Why doesn’t this URL work!¶
About 80% of the support tickets read “This URL _________ doesn’t work, you guys need to fix it.” There are a number of things that could have gone wrong when we process a URL. Sometimes it’s our fault, sometimes there is nothing we can do about it. Here are some steps to follow:
- Try the URL through our response explorer . If it works there, but not in your code, you might be doing something wrong.
- If it’s a YouTube video make sure embedding has been enabled for that URL. If it’s disabled then Embedly can’t return a video response.
- If it’s a Facebook URL make sure that the photo is public and you are using the public URL. Otherwise it will not work.
- Force Embedly to reevaluate the link. Sometimes pages will 404 for a brief time or a timeout could have happened. You can attempt to fix a URL by forcing Embedly to reevaluate the page. To do this just add force=true to the query parameters of your call.
- Nothing works...help! If none of those things work, please submit a ticket and we will have a look. You can either file a ticket through your app dashboard or send an email to support@embed.ly.
Should all photo embeds have a thumbnail?¶
No, not all photo embeds provide a thumbnail.
Where can I find example code for calling the Embedly API?¶
We have created some example apps using the Embedly API that can be used for instructive purposes. The source for these apps can always be found on our github page. We usually accompany our example apps with a post on our blog.
Embedly libraries for various programming languages are provided on our github page in the form of Embedly-$lang. Each of the Embedly libraries contain example code snippets in their documentation. The library documentation is either contained or referenced in the projects README file. If you don’t see your language of choice, then feel free to request a client library for your language via support@embed.ly.
Should I use the URL parameter, or the urls parameter?¶
Using urls will generally be faster, since we will fetch all urls in parallel. The downside is that the response will be as fast as the slowest URL in the list. Depending on your usage patterns, most urls should already be cached on our side, so using urls is a safe bet. It will give you the benefit of parallel requests without having to write any additional code.