Project Freewheel - including your own DWF bookmarklet

Many of you may recall my Beyond the Paper blog article entitled DWF-This-Link Bookmarklet. You will now find this functionality on Project Freewheel as Render-This-Link. Autodesk Legal requested that we not use DWF as a verb. So we changed the name to reflect how Project Freewheel renders the DWF file as a thumbnail in place of the original link. (I am reminded of a Late Show with David Letterman show where Dave cautioned the audience that the FCC will only let him use the word "prick" as a verb.)

With this in mind, a Ms. Calleigh Duquesne from Miami, Florida writes in:

I control my web site. I recently updated my web site to include the "Render This Link" icon that has a hyperlink to the Project Freewheel web site which explains how to add the bookmarklet to a user's favorites list. I want the user to have the option to convert the DWF links on my site to thumbnails if they want to. I would like them to be able to do so without having to go to the Project Freewheel page, add the bookmarklet to their favorites, and then apply the bookmarklet to my site. Is it possible to do this directly from my site?

Since you have control of your own pages, the normal course of business is to just include the thumbnails that are dynamically rendered by Project Freewheel. As you update your DWF files, the thumbnails automatically update. But if you wish to make the thumbnails optional, Software Evangelist, Brian Pene, and I cooked up a simple example:

Try render_this_link_test.htm

You can see how clicking on the "CLICK TO SEE DWF THUMBNAILS" image converts the DWF hyperlinks to thumbnail images that are hyperlinks. This happens in one easy step. If you would like to add this capability to your own site, once on this page, you can do a "View Source" and see the JavaScript that allows the bookmarklet functionality to be included on the same HTML as the DWF links themselves. Showing design data in different ways - connecting people with links or pictures - is alive in the lab.