Tip: Embed external content into your start.me page

Tip: Embed external content into your start.me page

Did you know that you can use the Embed widget to easily embed content (widgets, images, videos, etc) from external services to your start.me page?

Instructions to add the Embed widget to your page:

  1. On your start.me page, click on the “+” in the grid
  2. Select “Embed webpage” in the list of widgets
  3. Copy the “embed code” (provided by the external site) or URL (to an image/video or HTML web page) into the Embed widget
  4. Done!

To give you some examples of content that you can add to your start.me page:

Example #1: Weather Forecast

Forecast.io provides a great free weather widget that provides you with a 7-day weather forecast for any location in the world.

Embed code:
<iframe id="forecast_embed" type="text/html" frameborder="0" height="245" width="100%" src="https://forecast.io/embed/#lat=42.3583&lon=-71.0603&name=Downtown Boston"> </iframe>

You can change the following parameters in order to retrieve weather data for another location:

  • lat – Latitude
  • lon – Longitude
  • name – Name of the location (you want to display inside the widget)

If you don’t know your Latitude/Longitude, you can use another online service – like mygeoposition.com – to retrieve it for you.  For more information about this Weather widget and additional configuration options, see blog.forecast.io.

Example #2: Youtube

Saw an interesting video on Youtube that you want to post to your start.me page? Simple copy the Youtube URL of the video into the embed widget and you’re done.

Example #3: Website performance chart

Compete.com provides many website performance data tools. They also provide a chart widget that lets you display the performance for a specific website over the last 13 months.

Simply go to compete.com, enter the URL of the site you want to follow and then click the “Embed” button inside the graph to generate the embed code that you can paste into your start.me page.

Some other tips about the Embed widget

  1. You can add multiple embed widgets to the same start.me page, allowing you to create a full fledged dashboard with information pouring in from various sources.
  2. In the Embed Widget settings you can configure the height of the widget and the suppressing of borders.
  3. Make sure to embed content served over https:// as the Embed widget may not work otherwise. Read more about this here.

Questions or suggestions for widgets?

Please drop us an e-mail at support@start.me or leave a comment, if you have any questions about the embed widget. We also love to hear from you what kind of external widgets you use on start.me, so we can look into providing these widgets by default in our widget library.

4 Replies to “Tip: Embed external content into your start.me page”

  1. Hello,

    I would like to insert a photo of my family to my start.me page. The photo is not uploaded to the internet.

    Is it impossible to attach it only to a start.me widget, do I really have to upload it somewhere else to get an url that I can paste into an embed page widget of start.me?

    Thanks in advance for the answer,
    Tom

    1. Hi Tom! We are currently working on a proper solution for this. In the mean time, there is a big of a workaround you can use: create a Bookmarks widget, add some link (perhaps to Google), set it to the largest possible icon setting and upload your family photo as an icon for this bookmark.

  2. How can i create my start.me page. Plzzzzzz Explain…:)
    By the way Compete.com chart widget is awesome to measure the website performance.

    1. @CANTONOHSTORAGE – Just type start.me in a web browser. Then click the big green Get Started button in the center of the page. If you prefer, click “Try anonymously” rather than “Sign up.” Either way, follow the intro to start.me. Then try adding something simple like a bookmarks widget.

      There is a very extensive set of help links here, on the support page:
      https://support.start.me/hc/en-us

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