Kerry Kidwell-Slak, associate director of internships and employment in UMBC’s Career Services Center, recently spoke with Policy Link (for the newsletter America’s Tomorrow) about tech employers seeking diverse candidates.

The first televised debate in Maryland’s Democratic gubernatorial campaign aired Wednesday, May 7. Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, Attorney General Douglas Gansler, and Del. Heather Mizeur discussed everything from the rollout of the Affordable Care Act to legalization of marijuana.

Public Policy Professor and Chair Donald Norris was interviewed for several stories previewing and recapping the debate. In The Washington Post on May 6, Norris discussed what was at stake for the front-runner in the race, Anthony Brown, saying “his main goal has got to be not to make any colossal mistakes.”

In a Baltimore Sun article analyzing the debate, Norris commented on Mizeur’s performance: “She was positive, she was direct, she said what she wanted to do very clearly,” said Norris. “The other two guys were beating each other up.”

Norris was also interviewed for a story that aired on WJZ Channel 13 recapping the debate. He commented on the discussion of the troubled rollout of the state health exchange, saying it likely will not play a major role in the election.

“The Baltimore Sun poll back in February showed that only about six percent of the respondents cared about that issue,” said Norris. He also said the candidates failed to gain any traction on the issues during the debate.

To read the complete article in The Washington Post, click here. For the full story in The Baltimore Sun, click here, and to watch the story on WJZ 13, click here.

On Saturday, April 26, Kimberly Moffitt participated in a panel discussion at Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre as part of its World of the Play series. The event, called “Race and Representation: Our Greatest Accomplishment. Our Greatest Shame,” featured panelists who shared their commentaries on race, theatre and film, drawing from the current production at Everyman, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark by Lynn Nottage. The discussion was broadcast May 2 on The Marc Steiner Show. Moffitt, an assistant professor of American studies, discussed how the play applies to present day society.

“What I thought was most interesting about Lynn Nottage’s work is that it makes the evolution of black women in film a contemporary issue,” Moffitt said. “Even though it is set in the 1930s, for us to watch what Vera Stark’s experience was in the 30s trying to be a Hollywood star…we’re still dealing with so many of those issues in present day.”

Moffitt also co-authored an op-ed that appeared in The Baltimore Sun on May 2 entitled, “Building strong children.” The column focused on the importance of educational opportunity for young black men in Baltimore. Moffitt, who is a founder of Baltimore Collegiate School for Boys, a public charter school in Baltimore City, wrote the article with Betsey Swingle Hobelmann and Jack J. Pannell Jr. Pannell Jr. and Hobelmann are also founders.

You can listen to the full segment on The Marc Steiner Show here. You can read the full column in The Baltimore Sun here.

On Tuesday, May 6, as part of an event during the Children’s Mental Health Matters Campaign, the UMBC Department of Psychology’s YouthFIRST team, led by Associate Professor Jason Schiffman and YouthFIRST Anti-Stigma Division Director Danielle Denenny; Taking Flight and the Maryland Coalition of Families for Children’s Mental Health; the Mental Health Association of Maryland; and the UMBC Counseling Center hosted a panel discussion entitled, “Students Share Stories: Navigating College with Mental Health Challenges.”

Speaking to an audience of nearly 100 people, three UMBC student panelists shared their personal journeys through illness and recovery and discussed issues of stigma and mental health. Imparted were stories of isolation, despair, challenges, and fear; as well as stories of growth, meaning, perseverance, inspiration, friendship and love.

The messages of both pain and hope challenged the audience to understand new perspectives and began a dialog in the service of breaking down barriers and promoting inclusivity. The audience expressed gratitude for the panelists’ openness and asked questions that inspired ideas and created deep personal connections.

Earlier in the day, in an attempt to promote the panel event and to bring greater awareness to mental health in an uplifting way, Dr. Schiffman, Elaine O’Heir, Nicole Mooney and the entire YouthFIRST team organized a flashmob on campus in front of the Math/Psychology building. Led by Dr. Schiffman’s seven and eight-year-olds, Chloe and Jacob, more than 200 people united to celebrate mental health through dance. The video can be found here.

Name: Robert Roselle

oEmbed is a neat little technology that allows for rich content to be embedded into other content very easily. You paste a link to the "thing" and, when published, that link magically transforms into something much more useful than a link. A quintessential example is a link to a YouTube video. Just drop the URL to a video in a blog post, and it will transform into an embedded version of that video. Flickr URL... turns into an embedded photo.

CodePen supports oEmbed as well, which means you can put Embedded Pens in some interesting places right now, and enabling your site to allow them is pretty easy as well.

I mention this here, because it works great right here on CSS-Tricks!

Embedded Pens in the Forums

We encourage you to post Pens of issues in the forums anyway, because that's 100 times easier to play with and diagnose than trying to just look at code and imagine it.

Embedded Pen in the Comments

Right here in the blog, works the exact same way.

Why use oEmbed?

Of course, it's easy. But there is more than that. With oEmbed, you are whitelisting places you allow embedded rich content from. It's a trust thing.

CodePen embeds require JavaScript to work. That sounds anti-progressive-enhancement, but it's actually the opposite. By requiring JavaScript, we can take a perfectly good bit of content (a sentence explaining the title, author, and info about a Pen) and transform it into an <iframe> embed experience. So without JavaScript, the content still "works" and makes sense. With JavaScript, it's better. An <iframe> alone would just break in a no-JS environment (for us).

So, because we need need that <script> for our embeds to work, that limits where they can be used. Most sites don't allow you to just to execute whatever <script> you put on them. That would be highly irresponsible and a major security flaw (XSS). With oEmbed, you can allow that <script> through only for trusted sources. Pretty cool way to handle it, I think.

How it Works

oEmbed works by:

1. Detecting URLs that match one of the whitelisted URL formats any particular site supports
2. Makes a request to that sites oEmbed API, passing along that URL
3. The API returns HTML the site uses to embed that "rich content"

You can see more about the CodePen oEmbed API here, including our API endpoint and what we return.

Enabling oEmbed on your WordPress site

It's basically one line of code to enabled it on a self-hosted WordPress site, but you might as well make use a plugin because that's what they are for. Then to make it work in comments (and bbPress), there is another plugin.

Iframely supports CodePen, and 900+ other domains embedded content, so that's an option too.

If you use Jetpack, support is coming soon to that.

But remember, if you are just embedding Pens into blog posts and stuff you don't need oEmbed at all. You can use our embed code, which means you can adjust heights and change themes and stuff, which is more powerful.

Discourse supports CodePen oEmbed

Discourse, as in the excellent forum software.

WordPress.com supports CodePen oEmbed

Thanks to Joey Kudish and the WordPress.com for getting Embedded Pens working there!

Lemme know if you end up using it in a cool way.

A major reason we started building CodePen at all was because showing snippets of code alone pales in comparison to seeing that code actually running, and this makes it easier to bring those running bits of code to the same types of places that used to be limited to snippets.

oEmbed Bring Embedded Pens All Over is a post from CSS-Tricks