Embed directories

[bmann]

Summary

I want to show the contents of a directory in a blog post, so people can get a sense of what the contents are.

Today, I screenshot the folder and then link the image to the live view in Drive.

See https://drive.fission.codes/#/QmYGs1ksGX3eMiGvxNuvRT6PD7zPKZpHyiUDXKGQoL4R7S and https://blog.fission.codes/experimenting-with-hls-video-streaming-and-ipfs/ for examples of this.

I'm specifically calling this embed directories, as I think that embedding individual files is a different problem space.

Directories of images become mini-galleries, directories of audio files become mini-playlists, depending on further options to display content differently.

Drive Widget

One way to solve this would be to write a small chunk of javascript.

As an example, here is the documentation for the Tito ticketing widget https://ti.to/docs/widget

For Drive, a Share option would have an Embed option, and then display a chunk of code that can be cut/paste.

Downside of this is that this would only work for platforms that allow for HTML/JS widgets.

OEmbed Support

A general solution that would make this work in anything that supports OEmbed -- and would extend to individual files -- would be to add OEmbed support for Drive. That needs to be written up and researched in detail, as it may mean needing to run a proxy at drive.fission.codes alongside the go-ipfs gateway.

This has a fair amount of operational complexity in needing to write new code and run an OEmbed server.

The upside is that any application that supports OEmbed will "just work" when Drive links are pasted in, and show a rich preview for different directory and file types.

Medium being one big publishing example that is widely used.

Further Thoughts

How could this be implemented in such a way that any Fission app could easily do embedding, in a way that Fission services provide central support?