Great topic for a book, just ordered it. To support embeddable menus for Real Time Farms we went with:

- a script include that is very lightweight and only

- document.writes an iframe and

- asynchronously loads a helper script to deal with cross domain communication so that the frame can change height when the menu tabs change

See it in action here http://www.northernspyfoodco.com/menus/dinner

it eventually loads the iframe with this content:

http://www.realtimefarms.com/restaurant/northern-spy-food-co...

The benefit of using an iframe so far has been much easier reuse of code for the widget content. However, we've had a few folks request to use their own stylesheet which can't be supported (instead we offer a configuration of the embed snippet to style a few things like menu width, fonts family and colors).

In any case, if we learn even a single helpful trick about embedding rich content from this book, it will have been money well spent!

Very cool widget. Integrates really well with the page - if you hadn't told me, I'd have no idea it was being served externally.

Bought the book immediately, as what we do for a living is third-party JavaScript (search engine for e-commerce, offered as a service).

But I'm surprised to find that there is no mention of Ajax Crawling and SEO (see http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/), which is a crucial issue, a deal-breaker for many customers. I realize this is a MEAP book, but even the Table of Contents does not hint that search engine indexing will be treated in any way.

You make a good point. It isn't addressed in the book as-is, but I'll make sure it is in a future revision.

Bought the book immediately - I don't think I've ever bought something so quickly!

This is a book whose value is very clear - if you're working in the field of embeddable widgets (as I am), you know how "hack-ish" and tricky a field it is. The Disqus people have managed to make a great product despite this - any tricks I can learn from them that will make my life easier will be worth tons.

I agree with jwr - SEO is a big topic which I know nothing about, except feeling vaguely uneasy since I know we're losing a lot of SEO opportunities with our widget. Definitely a topic that should be covered in the book.

This might be a niche topic, but how about talking about advertising inside widgets in the book? Advertising is a method that many widgets use to monetize, but I'm unclear how well the standard Google adwords, etc. solutions work with embeddable widgets.

funny 'cause now the first thing I see is - hey, they used the 'twitter bootstrap' look on this page

Congrats again guys! I've already picked up a bunch of tricks from the first few chapters that are available, so it's immediately paid for itself in my mind.

Thank you, financial disasters of the past. For the Europeans: If you order the printed book with the 50% off voucher with the cheaper postage fee, you still won't pay much more than 25 Euros. Oh, and thank you for making that book. That's a title that was definitely missing from my bookshelf (yeah, we still have those in Europe ;)).

This is interesting. When I worked at a high traffic news site, we had what seemed like an unending stream of low-level crises related to 3rd party scripts of various sorts and it always blew me away, not being someone who focused on the front end, that there wasn't a more formalized methodology for dealing with them.

Nope it's just hacks. The script tag with JSONP and nested iframes is pretty much all we've got.

I might be biased, but I disagree that it's "just hacks". Certainly hacks are involved, but there are a number of best practices and methodologies involved in proper third-party scripting. Which are covered in the book.

I recently had the pleasure of hearing on of your Engineers, Ben Vinegar, speak at a Tech Talk in Toronto. My impression from the talk was that the hacks were perhaps the more interesting subject. I hope you haven't cut them all out of your book.

That content is still in there. I just don't want people to think of this book as a one-trick pony :)

Just impulsively bought it. I am creating web widget in my Last project and curious how it be done in the 'standard' way.

fwiw, chrome 15.x has some issues with the voucher input box. Problem doesn't occur with Firefox.

Thanks for the tip. I'll pass this on to the folks at Manning.

Great timing! Starting a widget project soon, will this be on O'Reilly's Safari?

The book is being published by Manning, so probably not :(

Okay, I was completely unaware, but Manning books do appear on Safari, and so will this one once it's 100% finished.

Definitely checking this out, something I definitely want to read more into.