A Glitch in the ‘Gram Matrix
Instagram introduced an embedding feature back in 2013 to make it easier for journalists and bloggers on the internet to link Instagram videos and photos in the articles directly from their accounts. Embedding is known as the integration of links, images, videos, posts or other content directly from other platforms and websites into your own web pages for articles or blogs. Any embedded content appears as a part of its parent website and platforms on your webpage, encouraging a higher level of engagement and clicks on the original content.
Embedding provides news and blog agencies with credibility and improves the user experience since viewers will not have to visit another platform to confirm the credibility of an article and its contents. Even more so, celebrities prefer to be credited for their photos or content directly from their official accounts. Instagram embed code is available only for the accounts whose media is public.
We, at Media Quotient Inc., have been embedding Instagram posts as well in every news article that we publish on our website, and that is how one of our developers noticed a glitch that Instagram took longer than expected to fix. If you are a blogger or a developer who publishes blogs, you would know that Instagram provides two options for embedding code, i.e.: with the original Instagram caption, and then without the caption. Since the last three to four weeks, whenever we uncheck the option of ‘Include caption’, the code does not exclude the caption and we are required to remove a small part of the code manually.
This is really just a small glitch in the platform’s internal coding and very few people might have made the effort of reporting this bug. However, when a person has to embed 20 or 30 Instagram posts in a day, it does become an added responsibility to look into while maintaining the usual checklist for posting a blog or news article.
We are hoping to ping Instagram to fix this bug through this post and make our and other journalists’ lives easier.
In the meantime, we will keep on updating you with the news. Stay tuned!
Credits: Pixabay
