Share an observation

How it opens#

The player's Share button gives the same two things as this page, on one screen: the Link or the Embed code, for the Player or for the Editor opened on the same recording. The options below are those it offers, each starting as the player is at that moment; they apply to the link and to the code of the sections that follow.

What each one writes#

The summary chips are the strip of what the recording states, under the picture: the date said in words with its weekday, the position, the observer, the weather, and a Description chip showing the first words of the account, which opens the whole text in place of the chips (a cross puts them back). The player's own page shows them unless labels=0; the element itself shows them only with show-labels. The Editor takes no option, only the recording.

1. A link to ufoathome's player#

The simplest of the two, and the only one that needs nothing at all of the place you are sending it to. Anybody who follows it sees the observation played in the real sky of the date and place it states, in their own language.

Good for an email, a message, a comment, a forum that allows nothing but text — anywhere you can put a URL. The field above starts on one of this site's own recordings so the button does something; the address you put there is your own, on your own host, and this site never needs a copy of it.

Where the link is shown as a card (a social network, a messaging app, a forum that unfolds links), the card can say more than the project's logo. The server reads your file when the link is fetched: the card shows the observation's name, its image (an address, absolute or relative to the file) and its summary (a sentence or two, as a plain string or one per language). Without a summary, the card says who saw it, in which case and when, as far as the file and its address tell; without an image, it shows the logo. A case file takes the same two fields. summaryTime (seconds) tells the project's capture tool which instant of the simulation to photograph for the image, when the first one does not show the phenomenon.

2. On your own page#

Two lines of HTML put the reconstruction itself in your page, the way a video goes in a page. No framework, and nothing for your site to build.

The result:

That is a live element, not a picture — the same one those two lines would give you. Which of the three components to use instead, and everything they can be told, is on the components page.

The script's address has no version in it, so your page follows each release without being edited: browsers ask on every visit whether it changed, and the answer costs nothing while it has not.

What a recording needs to be shareable#

One thing: a public address. Anywhere a browser can fetch it from — a static site, a file host, a repository's pages. A file on your own disk has no URL anybody else can follow, and that is the only real requirement.

If the address is public, opens fine in your own browser, and the player still says it could not be read, the cause is almost always the same one: the server is not telling browsers that other sites may read the file. The remedy is one response header, Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *, on the JSON. Most static hosts — GitHub Pages, Netlify, S3 — either send it already or let you add it in a line of configuration; if the server is not yours, that is the single thing to ask its administrator for. The player and the editor both say so when they detect it, so you should not have to guess.

Nowhere to put it yet? The editor also takes a recording pasted straight in, which is enough to check one before publishing it — though a pasted one cannot, of course, be shared by link.

Don't have a recording at all? Make one; what goes in the file is described on the sighting file's page.