How to Embed Soundslides into WordPress.com Blogs

13Nov11

Soundslides is the industry standard tool for producing audio slideshows and is used widely by journalists and media organisations. Although it has many advantages it is not the easiest tool to embed your final project to the web. The soundslide embed tool allows you to generate embed code to post a flash version of your slideshow to the web. Although this works for self-hosted wordpress blogs it will not work on the free wordpress.com service.  This is a problem for journalism educators who use this with their students.

Thanks to some searching around on the forums and to some help from Panos at the WordPress.com forum I’ve finally figured out how to embed Soundslides on free wordpress.com blogs.

As you will see in the above example all the usual embed functions are working.

You don’t even need to generate an embed code. Just use this format:

gigya src="http://yourServer.com/PublishToWebFolderName/soundslider.swf?size=0&format=xml" allowFullScreen="true"

Enclose the code in [ ] square brackets to indicate that this is wordpress shortcode.

Two things to note are:

• Many WordPress blogs do not have a wide enough frame to accommodate the full version of Soundslides so “size=0″ is important – this uses the small format generated in your original “Publish to web” folder. For more detail on this and to source wide format themes see Pano’s post on theme widths;
• The hight is also restrained so you need to untick “show header” in the “Template” menu on Soundslides before you export your publish folder.

If you include the header field even if it is blank your controls at the bottom will be cut off:

If you are using one of the wordpress themes that can accommodate the full 620 wide format you need to use the following code

gigya src="http://YourServer.com/publishToWebFolderName/soundslider.swf?size=1&format=xml" width="620" height="533" allowFullScreen="true"

See an example of the two sizes on the Fusion theme here.

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