Putting this out there in hopes that it might save someone time & frustration down the road. A few months back I needed to place links in my webpages that called for “curling” the URL. I could have gone for a straight iframe, but doing so would have meant forgoing the SEO benefit, not to mention the embedded data wouldn’t have been responsive. The third party vendor behind the data provided me with a four page instruction manual - that made zero sense to me. Googling for assistance/solutions didn’t help either. After spending hours trying to figure out how to do bring the data in, someone suggested Stacks4Stacks (@willwood) EMBED stack. Nothing on the description page mentioned curl, but the stack is free, so I downloaded and tried it. Holy cow! There’s an option right there for bringing a URL in via curl - and no special code is needed server-side?! Yes - it works beautifully (see it under the Reviews tab, here - and no, this is not a link that can be brought in via iFrame, html, or anything else that I’m aware of - I tried them all…it must be curled).
So, if you’re searching the forum for a way to Curl a URL, here’s your free solution. However, consider how much the stack is saving you in terms of frustration and time…and click the DONATE button! Will is providing the solution for free - but it’s through our generosity that makes it possible for him to do so.
Hey Matthias (@RapidBase) - be sure you have the latest version installed. I actually had versions 1 and 3 installed prior to installing Stacks 4. Upon installing, S4 chose the the outdated version of Embed, and the settings weren’t there, which meant upon republishing the page, my reviews were gone. Very frustrating (but my fault, entirely) - thankfully Will pointed me in the right direction. I removed version 1 and all is good now. A screenshot below is what you will see in the HUD of version 3.0.0. (version 1 shows Data URL and Error Message instead of Content Type and Embed Type)
Thanks @Dave! Already got the latest version. I didn’t realize that I should use the “Plain Text File” Content Type. Am I right in thinking that this way you can bring in most php pages into a RW page? I tried it with several .php pages but had no success (nothing or error messages displayed).
Are you able to “import” this page into a RW page using the “Embed” stack? http://browsercheck.nl
Hey @RapidBase - nope, that didn’t work. Is it supposed to be Curled? In the screenshot below:
The left column is the simple URL that needs to be curled
The middle is the same URL pasted into an iFrame. No good
The right is your URL, curled
If, on the other hand, I bring your URL in as an iFrame, it works just fine.
If you’d like to see the page live, let me know and I’ll PM you the link. I’d rather not publish it since the link that needs to be curled, in the middle column, will show up (it doesn’t seem to if it’s been curled).
Thanks @Dave, the iFrame works like a charm for me. So no need for “the CURLy stuff”.
I don’t know if the Browser-Check link “needs to be curled”, but obviously that doesn’t work. Thanks for your help with this.
If you don’t know what curl is, it’s basically a terminal version of a browser. This also means that for each page load the user will have to wait for the server to connect to a url, pull it down and insert it into the webpage before sending it to the browser. So depending on a lot of things, this could really slow down your page load times. Used properly, it can be a great thing. I wouldn’t go crazy using it though.
Thanks for the explanation, Joe. Good to know. In my case, it’s essential since we’re bringing in reviews from Google and Facebook- which our clients find very, very useful. I could bring the reviews in via an iFrame instead, but there is no SEO benefit from doing it that way. By Curling, our vendor disavows the reviews from their site and allows the SEO juice to flow to us.
But looking at the stack settings I cannot find anything to bring in a URL via CURL. Any tip for me…? 
