Good morning friends and welcome to my little blog, a blog that wordpress has apparently decided to use its ‘visual’ writing system on, which has a lot of problems, and probably means that whatever videos I post in future are going to be a bitch to make appear on the page. Thank you wordpress for your infallible creative choices!
I’m sorry wordpress, I do love you.
But visual does completely suck.
Seriously though, how difficult can it be really to learn how to insert images into your post, because really that was the only html you needed in the old version.
I didn’t even have to use paragraph breaks, wordpress did them for me!
I wouldn’t even be having this rant-ish-type conversation with myself/the internet/wordpress right now if it wasn’t for the fact that I now write for Teen Skepchick, where the visual editor is already in place.
I still can’t work out how to get videos to work on it, and youtube gives you the freaking code to use!
What you should do when you upgrade your service is to make it simpler, and while you may think you have done that wordpress, you haven’t, you’ve just made it more awkward.
Not that I’ll blog somewhere else, I like wordpress and I refuse to use a blog site that actually has blog in its name on pure principle.
That’s right, I’m talking to you blogspot!
Don’t you walk away from me blogger!
Even though Alter The Press uses you…
I can help with the video-embed, I think. For YouTube, anyway.
First, switch from visual to html editing. Then you need the URL from the embed code. Not from your address bar, as that often doesn’t have the http bit at the front, which it won’t work without. You’ll also need to specify a custom size, and make note of with width and height.
Add the URL into the following code:
<div style="margin:10px auto; width:400px;">
[youtube=URL_HERE&w=400&h=233]
</div>
(If that code displays properly, the double-quotes should be straight, not the curly ones that WordPress often defaults to. If they are curly, you’ll need to replace them with straight.)
Change the 400 and 233 (width and height) to match your custom size, noting that the width appears in both the first line and at the end of the URL.
Paste into your post in html mode, wherever you want the vid. Job done, and it should be centred in the page, too.
Only drawback is that if your theme uses curly quotes, switching back to visual editor will often change the quotes to left-curly and right-curly, mucking the code up, so best not to embed the video until you’re done editing text, unless you’re happy text-editing in html mode.
Oops, I mucked up
All you need is the alpha-numeric string at the end of the URL, right after “embed/”
For the line in square brackets, make it:
youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALPHA_NUMERIC&w=400&h=23And add in the alpha-numeric string.