All posts by John

I am a teacher, currently working in Banton Primary for North Lanarkshire Council. I also act as Product Owner/provide support for Glow Blogs. I like Blogs.

Google Calendars

Unlike other google embeds, you need to activate a plugin for this one.

This plugin will allow you to embed Google Calendars in Posts pages and in a Widget.

To use it you need to activate the plugin:
Dashboard->Plugins
Click the Activate link under the Plugin’s name:

Activate Plugin

You then need to get the embed code from the Google Calendar you want to embed.
The Calendar must be public.

Visit Google Calendars and for the calendar you want to show click the popup and choose Share this Calendar:

Screenshot google calendar popup to share

Make the Calendar Public if you have not done so already:

Screenshot google cal make public

Then go to the Calendar Details page and find the embed code:

Screenshot google calendar embed-code

You may want to click the customise link, which will allow you to change the size, colours etc. You might want to set the size to fit into your post.

Copy the embed code

Screnshot copy embed code

Edit the post or page you want the Calendar to appear on and paste in the code:

The embed code will look like this the html is changed automatically into a shortcode:

[googlecalendar src="https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?height=400&wkst=1&bgcolor=%23FFFFFF&src=pvhq66ns53b1v83ppd0r5dgfk0%40group.calendar.google.com&color=%230F4B38&ctz=Europe%2FLondon" style="border-width:0" width="600" height="400" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"]

but will embed the calendar when the post is published:

Google Calendar Embed Widget

You can also display a Calendar in a widget on the sidebar of your blogs. There is an example on the right of this page.

To add a widget you need the code again, it might be best to adjust the size by customising the code. Copy the code on the calendar site.

Add a Widget, Dashboard-Appearance-> Widgets, where you will find the Google Calendar Embed Widget.

google calendar widget in widget list

You can drag the widget to a sidebar or click it to expand and add with a button:

Screenshot widget embed, destination choice

Once it is added paste in the code:

Screenshot Google Calendar widget with embed code

Note the code is not changed to a shortcode.

The above code will produce the calendar widget.

Google Video

First you need to make sure the Jetpack plugin is activated and the shortcode module is turned on.

A video in your google drive can be embedded:

  1. Upload to GoogleDrive
  2. Open The Google Video page and choose Share from the vertical ellipsis at the top right.
  3. In the Advanced settings make the video Public on the Web
  4. From the vertical ellipsis menu choose open in a new window.
  5. In the window that opens choose embed from the  vertical ellipsis menu.
  6. copy the embed code and paste into the editor in the Text view.
  7. on saving it will be converted into a shortcode like this:

[googleapps domain="drive" dir="file/d/1H-oJO4UbdAuxXRYCFEJJo-ZwYKA4CR0C/preview" query="" width="640" height="480" /]

NB there appears at the time of writing, 11 Apr 2020, to be a problem with playback on Safari on mac & iOS. You can get videos to play if you go into Safari’s preferences and uncheck Prevent Cross Site Tracking. 

O365 forms

You can ’embed’ an O365 form in a blog by pasting the url into a post on a line by itself. Eg: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=oyzTzM4Wj0KVQTctawUZKSmIYBesqWVJqR5zz1mWNAVUOU1CUzVWOVFRUjc5RFcxQlJPTlhXMFVUNS4u

It will embed like this:

Not a true embed but a link to the form.

Sway

Note as of January 2024 there is a problem with embedding Sways. the link you copy now will be in the format: https://sway.cloud.microsoft/WR42BzNQhsCisIAW

which has changed from the old format: https://sway.com/WR42BzNQhsCisIAW

The new url does not work in Glow Blogs. Our developers are looking at the issue.

As a workaround you can just edit the link to use sway.com as opposed to sway.cloud.microsoft.

paste in the link to the sway: https://sway.office.com/WR42BzNQhsCisIAW

produces this:

Note, using the link provide by sway with ?ref=link at the end: https://sway.office.com/WR42BzNQhsCisIAW?ref=Link

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