How to make Blurb Bookshow widget work in WordPress

Marco Ryan — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 06:54:03 +0000

I was invited to trial the about-to-be launched Blurb BookShow widget – a great little application that allows you to embed a preview of your Blurb book in your blog or website page, thus helping to raise that book’s profile and also in providing the opportunity for up-sell.

I cut and pasted the code as suggested, and it didn’t work. When I read the small print it talked about “Support for WordPress hosted blogs will follow shortly”. So I made a work around that allows you to embed it in WordPress blogs, pages and sidebars.

Here are the steps:

1. You’ll need a blurb account and a book that has been published and is public (with previews turned on). Sign into your blurb account.

2. You’ll also need the Kimili Flash Embed Plugin for WordPress.

3. Go to the Blurb BookShow widget page: http://www.blurb.com/my/book/preview_widget

4. Select the book you want to profile.and then go into the “Copy and Past this code” dialog box . Find the section just after and embed opening tag that begins with (see yellow highlighted area in the image above):


5. Now select only the following from that bit of code: http://www.blurb.com/assets/embed.swf?book_id=XXXXX. Note this is the bit after the src tag up to and not including the type tag. Also note that I did not copy the quotation marks.
6. Now go to your WordPress post. Switch to HTML mode, and put your cursor where you want this to appear. Click on the Kimili Flash embed button. In the dialog box that appears, you then past the URL that you copied into the Flash.swf tag, that is probably currently saying untitled.swf.
7. Tweak the settings (the size for example) to what will fit well on your page, and you are done.
8. You could also pace this in a sidebar widget, and you can style the whle thing with 

You can see the sort of look and feel of the widget below for a book that I did last year on Cairo.


[kml_flashembed publishmethod="static" fversion="8.0.0" movie="http://www.blurb.com/assets/embed.swf?book_id=985751" width="450" height="300" targetclass="flashmovie"]

[/kml_flashembed]

marco ryan photography » Bookshow

How to make Blurb Bookshow widget work in WordPress