Don't use this Scribd plugin for iPaper docs — use Embedly instead

I wanted to display a slide show that was hosted on Scribd.com (see Mary Meeker’s slides on theBrilliant analysis of current internet marketing trends post). There is a lot of good content on Scribd that you may want to share with your audience, and it should be one of your choices in addition to SlideShare and Google Docs for storing your content in the cloud.

I noticed one of the options for embedding the Scribd slide show on your own website was a special WordPress.com code.  I thought, if it’s good enough for WordPress.com blogs I expect that would be the best choice for shelf-hosted WordPress blogs too. But I was wrong…

I thought I’d find a suitable plugin to be able to use the Scribd shortcode. I did find  ZD Scribd iPaper on the WordPress.org plugin site. This plugin is supposed to display iPaperEmbed Scribd supported documents in your wordpress website.

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Initially it seemed to work. Great news, but then I noticed when I used the Scribd “WordPress.com” code and activated this plugin to display the slide show, my site page load time slowed to a crawl. It was taking longer than half-a-minute for the page to finish loading!

Investigation led me to this plugin as the culprit. I removed the plugin and used the standard html embed code from Scribd, and now page loads are back to a second or two at most (even without the W3 Total Cache being turned on).

Then I discovered an even better solution!

[box size=small color=green align=left type=tick] You could use the Scribd embed code in your post, but if you have the Embedly plugin, just use the simple URL instead[/box]I’ve installed the Embedly WordPress plugin. This plugin leverages the oEmbed functionality built into WordPress since version 2.9. This plugin, as of November 2010, supports image/video sources from 73 services including Scribd. You just grab the URL from the source and paste it into your post. (note: I’ve noticed that Embedly doesn’t like the source URLs being enclosed in html tags, even “p” tags, so just paste those URLs in HTML view when editing your WordPress post, and don’t try to format the URL. If you see the URL and not the image, check your HTML-view.)

See the Embedly plugin in action displaying a Scribd slideshow atBrilliant analysis of current internet marketing trends.