Question

How do I grab meta data from other websites and display on mine in Ruby on Rails?
I asked this question before and thought I found the solution but it doesn’t seem like I have.

When using FB or Google+ I can paste a link of any website into the status update box and it will instant load information about that website with the option of flicking through thumbnail images.

How can I go about achieving this in ruby on rails? All my searches seem to bring up php methods on how to do this.

Last person suggested oembed or embedly but embedly will charge me and oembed ruby gem doesn’t seem like it will work the way I wish.

For example, I provide textfield or textarea and user types or pastes in URL and jQuery AJAX does its magic and I display something similar to the images below back to my user:

or

For grabbing video data info I use the Ruby Open Graph Protocol gem. Is there any thing for grabbing data the way FB and G+ do? If not is there a standard way this is done in Rails/Ruby, if so, how is this done?

Answer 1

Maybe such gems as Mechanize and Pismo would be helpful.

Mechanize:

require 'mechanize'
agent = Mechanize.new
page = agent.get('http://google.com/')
page.title
 => "Google"

And Pismo:

require 'pismo'
page = Pismo::Document.new('http://google.com')
page.title
 => "Google"