Embed buttons

What you get

Two cards, and a plain link if you would rather style your own button. Both are generated from a page you can already see — there is no account to make, no key to get, and no ownership check. Anyone can build the snippet for any publication; it is a link with a nice picture on it.

The card is an iframe plus a few lines of script. The script listens for the card's own height and resizes the frame to match, so a long publication name or a two-line bio does not end up scrolling inside a box. Paste both parts.

A subscribe button for a publication

Open the publication's page on Standard Reader and use Share → Embed subscribe. Pick a layout, copy the snippet, paste it where you want the card.

A follow button for you

The same card exists for a person. Open your own profile and use the menu beside Follow → Embed follow.

Reach for this one when a publication is the wrong unit: your writing is spread across several of them, you post under your own name rather than a masthead, or the site you are putting the card on is a personal homepage rather than one publication's. Following you also picks up everything you publish, so a reader who follows the person does not have to keep track of which masthead a piece landed under.

Landscape, portrait, or a plain link

Both dialogs offer the same three, and you can switch between them before copying — the preview above the snippet is the real card, not a mockup.

1. 1
   Landscape is a compact row: avatar, name, button. It suits a sidebar, a footer, or the end of a post — anywhere you want a line rather than a block. The description is dropped at this size.
2. 2
   Portrait stacks everything and keeps the description. Better as a standalone call to action, or in a narrow column.
3. 3
   Link is not a card at all — just an anchor to the same destination, unstyled, for when you would rather it match your own buttons. No iframe and no script.

The snippet fixes the card at 400px wide, which is the width the preview shows. Change the width on the wrapper and the frame follows; the height keeps managing itself.

What the card takes from your brand

A subscribe card reads the publication's own basicTheme colors, so it matches whatever you set on the publication with no extra parameters. An account has no theme record anywhere on the network — there is nowhere to put one — so a follow card always paints in Standard Reader's default palette.

Neither card picks up fonts. Both use Standard Reader's own type, on purpose: a card that half-matches your site reads worse than one that plainly does not, and web fonts inside an iframe are a load cost your visitors pay for a button. If the type matters more than the card, take the Link tab and style it yourself.

What happens when someone clicks it

The button opens Standard Reader in a new tab rather than doing something in place, and that is not a shortcut we took. Subscribing writes a record to the visitor's own repo, signed by their own account — so it has to happen somewhere they are signed in, which is our domain, not yours. Your page never sees who they are.

1. 1
   Signed in already? The follow is written immediately and they land on a short confirmation. Two clicks total.
2. 2
   Signed out? They get a stripped-down sign-in naming what they are about to follow — your avatar, your name, nothing else of ours. It asks for the narrowest permission that covers the follow, not a full account sign-in, so someone who only wants to follow you is not handing over the rest.
3. 3
   Already following, or looking at their own card? They are told so and nothing is written twice.

A subscribe writes a site.standard.graph.subscription. A follow writes an app.standard-reader.graph.follow and, behind it, subscriptions to the publications you own — so the people who followed you from your own site stay yours if you ever leave Standard Reader. Both live in the reader's repo, not in a list we keep.

If you want to skip the card entirely, link straight to /subscribe// or /follow/ and style your own button — that is all the Link tab hands you. The follow link takes your handle in place of the DID, though the DID is the one that survives a handle change.

When the card does not show up

1. 1
   A blank space where the card should be. Almost always the host page's own content security policy refusing to frame another origin. Your site needs to allow https://standard-reader.app as a frame source; the browser console will say so outright.
2. 2
   The card is there but clipped, or has its own scrollbar. The resize script did not make it into the page — some editors strip script tags silently. Either paste it somewhere that keeps it, or set a generous fixed height.
3. 3
   The name or avatar is out of date. The card reads your profile when it loads, so it catches up on its own — but a browser that already has the frame cached may need a reload to notice.

Wiring your own site's records so its posts show up here at all is a different job — Publishing your site covers that, and you do not need any of it to use a button on this page.