We just launched a our new Embed.as service to power Rich Embeds on Write.as! This change is largely behind the scenes — our writers can continue sharing links from our many supported providers in their blog posts, and they’ll keep turning into nice embedded content without any extra work.

A new service

A few months ago, we got to work on our very own rich media-embedding service so we could switch away from the previous one we used, Embedly. While it worked well, Embedly was far overpriced for our needs, and didn’t give us the kind of flexibility we wanted, especially for building for an ever-evolving open web.

Now, we’ve launched Embed.as as a totally in-house service to provide this little feature that many of our users enjoy. To use it, you don’t need to go farther than your Write.as editor — simply paste in the URL of any post, video, photo, playlist, etc. on its own line in your blog post (supported sites shown below), and once published, it’ll turn into a gorgeous rendering of whatever content you’re sharing.

Supported Providers

All our Pro users can share content from any of these sites to have them show up nicely in your blog posts:

  • Are.na
  • Bandcamp
  • Bluesky
  • Codepen
  • Flickr
  • Giphy
  • Imgur
  • Kickstarter
  • Mixcloud
  • SoundCloud
  • Spotify
  • Typeform
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube

Coming up

While this is mostly a behind-the-scenes change today, we have more plans for Embed.as, including bringing Rich Embeds to WriteFreely.

As this launches and more people try it out here on Write.as, we’re going to continue testing in the real world, gathering feedback, improving how it works, and adding providers.

Then beyond that, we’ll add support for WriteFreely admins to connect with Embed.as, so their blog / community can have easy embeds too, using this new privacy-preserving service. Based on the feedback we get, we’ll likely offer this at a very affordable price.

We hope you continue enjoying writing here! You can follow along with Embed.as updates in the fediverse: @embed_as@musing.studio, and if you have any feedback or suggestions, we’d love to hear them on the forum!