Axel Cleeremans' project is a Laravel back-end with a custom "single page application" admin dashboard. In the admin I used the inline text editor Medium Editor to provide the author with rich tools to edit the posts and pages of his website.
One of the requirements of the project however, was the ability to embed link previews of web pages — much like one shares web content on Facebook. Since that feature isn’t built-in in Medium Editor, I decided to develop an extension for it.
After a lengthy research I came up with the suitable and original name for the plugin: “M-Embed”. It adds one button to the inline Medium Editor toolbar which enables to edit the currently selected URL or to embed it directly into the current contenteditable area. A demo of the extension as well as the source code are available on Github.
The data of the URL to embed is fetched through Embedly, which handles the parsing and caching of the requested resource. Luckily Embedly has a free basic plan which is sufficient for my purposes. (March 24th, 2018 EDIT: it seems the service is no longer offering the free plan, or not under the same terms and with the same usability). With Embedly I don’t need to rely solely on OEmbed or HTML meta tags, instead I can rely on the service to receive rich meta data about the web location.