[blog 2006-05-10] Complete Project Syndication Now Available!

by instructables-dan

1.3K917

Intro: [blog 2006-05-10] Complete Project Syndication Now Available!

You can now display your entire instructables project on your own web site! We've added the capability for you to grab entire project content in a format which is easily encapsulated on your own site. Why are we doing this? Instructables fully supports the Open Source movement and the idea of free availability of information. We're committed to leading the way in Open Source for "stuff". All the projects on Instructables are created by you, and we think that letting you use your projects any way you want will only make the projects and the site more useful to everyone. Don't forget that each project on the site is made available under the license specified by the author of the project (this appears in the left column when viewing the project). Most projects are available for non-commercial use only under the default Creative Commons license.

Here's how it works:
Say you are looking at a project with this URL:

https://www.instructables.com/ex/i/45B0E894078E1029853F001143E7E506

Just grab the unique ID at the end of that and put it into a syndication URL like this:

https://www.instructables.com/partner?name=none&style=all&format=html&project=45B0E894078E1029853F001143E7E506

This returns an unformatted HTML version of the complete project content! You can wrap that in your own stylesheet, etc. You can also get the unique ID from our RSS feeds, for example from the recent project feed:

https://www.instructables.com/ex/y/process/rss.xml

the unique ID appears in the GUID tag for each project.

Automation Scripts
We've provided a perl script below which you can use to automatically generate and update your web page with all your instructables projects. The script checks your RSS feed on instructables and makes an index page linking to the syndicated project pages. It's a great starting point for you to put your own stylesheet around and link into your personal website.

If you make your own syndication code and scripts, please post them too! and links to your syndicated site!

17 Comments

CheckDavid 12 years ago

Is this still working? I got a 404 error while trying the second link:

ERROR 400: can not find instructable: 45B0E894078E1029853F001143E7E506 -
ERROR 400: can not find instructable: 45B0E894078E1029853F001143E7E506

ALNag 13 years ago

great stuff!

royshearer 16 years ago

does this still work? having some trouble finding project IDs to paste into the link shown above

radiorental 17 years ago

Has anyone got local stylesheets on to the syndicated page?

Due to the structure of my site I have to pull in the instructable pages with an iframe, as that sandboxes the instructable from my local css I was wondering if anyone knows a workaround

here's my page, thanks

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Frameset//EN">
<html>
<HEAD>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<link href="../css/default.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<link href="../css/instructables.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<script src="../js/tabctrl.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="../js/define.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="../js/main.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

</HEAD>
<body>
<script>selectTab(Tab_projects,1)</script>
<iframe src="https://www.instructables.com/partner?name=none&style=all&format=html&project=E14OT83LJCEZ7BETJH" scrolling="auto" align="left" height="100%" width="100%" frameborder="0" />
</body>
</html>

dan 17 years ago

readymade.com has local stylisheets i think.

radiorental 17 years ago

It looks like they pull the syndicated page in with a script and then apply css inline. I aint got scripting with my poxy .mac account. I'm stuck pulling in the page within an iframe )o; Unless I'm missing a basic bit of html know how. How else to display a third party page within a page on www.my-own.com site??? (leaving all the js menu functionality intact on my site as well) thanks for your help.

dan 17 years ago

oh yes you are right they pull the page first with a script. i dunno how to do what you want without one but i'm not an expert either. you cant even run php?

radiorental 17 years ago

ok, thanks Dan, I have syndicated some of my projects on to www.pauric.net Havent installed perl on to .mac, another day.

kqrpnb 18 years ago

Can anyone who does this post their results to the thread? I would like to see how this works. Thanks, -kqrpnb

prank 17 years ago

I did it--check out the instructables section on http://www.artiswrong.com
(although I haven't thrown together a stylesheet, so the links are just unformatted so far)

excellent stuff, squidlings!

radiorental 18 years ago

I will be doing this very soon when I add an instructables tab to my site www.pauric.net I'll pm you when its done