One Old Web Page, Four Dead Embeds

Broken web stuff bothers me, especially when it’s my own stuff. Unlike when companies like Google et al break things, I can fix my own.

I was scouring for a ten year old blog post (there was a purpos/ed but that matters not) and came across a hand rolled web page for a presentation I did in 2011.

But oh, the white space where once there was media! I actually counted (and fixed) four different dead web technologies in one small html site.

Screen shot of web page with red text marking blank areas of no content for Flash-based slideshare embed, flash audio player, old YouTube embed, and Feed2JS embed to dead del,icio,us feed

Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!

Here is what I found:

An (un)embedded Slideshare presentation that used an old Flash based player. DEAD
An (un)embedded YouTube video that used some kind of deprecated iframe url format. DEAD
An mp3 file set to play in a Flash audio player. DEAD
An RSS Feed displayed using Feed2JS (a technology older than this stuff that still works) but the feed was from a del.icio.us tag. DEAD

The fixes were easy. For (1) and (2) I just had to go back to the source content and get modern embed code. The audio is easier now to do using an HTML5 audio player structure. And since long ago I migrated my social bookmarks from del.icio.us to pinboard I could grab the RSS feed URL for my tag, pop it into Feed2JS, and get an updated cut and paste embed code.

And here it is, all the way from February 2011, presentation resources from Looking Through the Lens, a talk I did for the Instructional Technology Council eLearning 2011 conference (their link is dead but I can unearth it from the WayBack Machine and hah, I forgot, I was a featured speaker, pftttt).

Here’s four dead embeds brought back to life.