HTML, XHTML & CSS

In This Chapter
Chapter 15
Bring the Best of the Web
to Your Web Site
▶ Understanding what embedding can do for your page content (and your workload)
▶ Embedding Twitter feeds, Flickr photos, and Google maps
▶ Making the most of multiple embeddings via mashups
▶ Mashing up maps and restaurant reviews, plus maps and Twitter feeds
To this point in the book, we cover a lot of the basics with HTML, XHTML,
and CSS on how to create your own Web site. Before you rush off and
start creating oodles of content, though, you might first want to find out
whether anything like what you want already exists. The great thing about
the Internet is that lots of excellent content is already out there, ripe for
(proper) reuse. With some practice, you can easily “grab” this content and
use it on your Web site. Harnessing the power of such services can save tons
of time and effort you would otherwise have to expend on your own, reinventing
well-worn wheels. After all, nobody wants to reinvent the wheel: Sure,
it’s okay improve upon it, but no need to start over from scratch.
For example, if you want to give a friend directions to your house, you could
spend lots of time painstakingly drawing or photographing your entire neighborhood.
Next, you could put all those images together and figure out how
to display them effectively. After all that work, you’d finally be ready to put
everything together inside a graphical interface so your site can provide
directions. That’s a big chunk of time working on a solution that might be
inaccurate owing to changes in the landscape by the time you finish, if you
finish at all. Sure, you can do all that, but who wants to? Numerous existing
solutions are readily available to handle this for you (such as Google or Bing
Maps, or perhaps MapQuest). Sometimes, getting things done is more about
embedding other content that works for your site so you can use your precious
time, energy, and money more wisely.