introducing profile-based embedding

As you’ve noticed, we’ve been focusing hard on new features for ImpactStory profiles.  Today we announce another step towards a great impact profile experience:  a new, simple approach to embedding ImpactStory data on your own website.

An “Embed” link at the top of your profile provides simple HTML code to include in your website.  Just add the line to any webpage and, poof!  Your whole profile is there, with all of your products and their impacts.  You can see it in action on Ross Mounce’s website.

We’ll be decommissioning old-style embedding badges in a month, on January 17th 2014, to streamline our efforts.  We know many of you have included these stand-alone badges on your journal, lab, and personal websites — we’ve loved seeing them there!  We hope you transition to our new embedding model, if it works for you.

We’re deeply committed to great embedding for ImpactStory profiles, because, well, it’s your profile. It should live where you want it to, and look how you want it to look. So we’re excited about continuing to improve the embedding experience. Let us know at feedback.impactstory.org what additional features would help you share your ImpactStory profile in all the ways you want to!

8 thoughts on “introducing profile-based embedding

  1. Love the java widget, sad to see it go. I don’t want to post my whole impact story profile on website. Will still link to it, but would like to display impact story data alongside list of pubs in my own format etc. on webpage.

    • jasonpriem says:

      Yep, we understand. We’re super excited about the embeddable profiles, but we realize they’re still a little rough around the edges. We’ll be continuing to add customizability and other features…stay tuned!

  2. How can an institution that wants to promote the impact of the scholarly products of its researchers transition to the embedded profile? Profiles are per user, not institution, and embedding a full profile doesn’t play well with most (all?) institutional websites and internal product reporting databases. For example, here’s the products and impact badges of publications arising from NESCent’s Google Summer of Code participations:

    http://nescent.org/science/products.php?productType=Publications&project=gsoc

    Does this mean we’ll have to take down the badges?

    • jasonpriem says:

      That’s corect, the old-style badges widget is going to stop working. We’ve sent out an email with more details to everyone using the widget.

      How can an institution that wants to promote the impact of the scholarly products of its researchers transition to the embedded profile?

      Great question! A lot of institutions are helping their faculty set up ImpactStory profiles, and having great success. We think that’s only going to get more attractive in the next few months as we continue to focus in on making the world’s most powerful researcher impact profile.

      • dleehr says:

        What about the REST API? Are those the endpoints that are being turned off? We picked the JavaScript widgets because they were simple and easy to implement on the NESCent products listing, but IIRC, the REST API would provide similar data.

      • The endpoints currently defined in the apiary docs are being turned off, yes… they are using legacy code not used by our application anymore, so they are poorly tested and supported. We encourage you to build things on a profile’s data, accessible like this: http://impactstory.org/user/HeatherPiwowar/products; we’ll be adding more features to this, changing its url to api.impactstory.org/ and eventually adding more endpoints for additional use cases.

  3. I’m a fan of the badges, so I’ll miss them. I liked the flexibility that they gave in choosing which products you could place them next to. I have co-authored some products which I haven’t included in my Impact Story profile, as they aren’t available online. If I embed my profile on my site, they won’t show up, so I’ll just link to it instead.

    • jasonpriem says:

      We’ll miss the embedded badges too in some ways. But unfortunately, less than 0.5% of our user were actually doing anything with the embed widget. And because it was trying to inject Javascript and CSS into all sorts of different environments, it broke a lot. So it was a pretty heavy support burden for a very small number of users; the math just didn’t add up.

      The nice thing is that this is going to give us time to focus on making the profiles way better, so that they can be a place where your co-authored publications can live, too. Our goal over the next few months is to make ImpactStory the only place your publication list needs to live online.

      We realize that we’ve got a long way to go on this. But we’re moving fast, and we’re liking what the next few months looks like…

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