Ask Candy: Inserting Videos in a Blog Post

Hey there, it's Candy! This week we have another question comes from Angela Flicker from The Artists' House. She's a quilter and the gal behind the month long blog hop called "A Crafty Holiday". She's just assembled a whole bunch of last minute shopping specials from lots of fantastic online makers!

I'm new to wordpress and often the littlest things take me forever to figure out. Like how do you post a video?

Ah, this is a pretty simple one Angela! Posting videos can add so much to your site...where else can you find a video of you, Linda and myself, all dressed up like elves?

Now, both Blogger and Wordpress have a button that allows you to upload your personal videos to your site, like you would a picture, but I've never tried it. Frankly, I worry about bandwidth and storage on my site, plus hosting the video on YouTube or Vimeo gets you the extra traffic from folks surfing around those sites as well. So if it's my own video, I'll 1st upload it to YouTube or Vimeo. And of course, there's all sorts of fun videos ripe for sharing on those sites that are a great way to liven up your blog.

When I 1st tried to post videos on my wordpress site I had a bit of trouble, and found that the solution depended upon whether it was a video hosted on You Tube, Vimeo or what have you, but it's pretty easy now. I'll also talk about posting videos on Blogger as well, for all the blogger folks out there.

Wordpress

For YouTube videos (and this fun Elf Yourself Video) somewhere on the page is a button that says "Embed This". It'll look something like this (circled in green) on YouTube

and this is how it looked on the Elf Yourself page.

So, once you've found the "embed this" button, you click on it you'll get a big hunk of html code....copy it all and then come back to your post composing screen. Click on the html tab (circled in green below)

and paste that whole bit of code in there. Then click back over to the visual editor and you'll see a big square - when you preview your post, voila -there's your movie!

Now, vimeo makes it really easy. Go to the page and grab the web address, it'll be "http://vimeo.com/4869960" (of course, the number will be different) and paste that where you'd like your movie - in the post visual editor, not the html.

Blogger

For Blogger blogs, you'll always just get the HTML embed code and paste it into the post using the edit HTML tab.

Here's some words of wisdom from Linda about the width of videos:

People may have issues with the width of the video on their blogs (I do). If you delete the height=” “ and then simply change the width number, the size should change in proportion. Otherwise, you’d have to mess with both numbers which is more difficult.

OK, hope that demystifies the posting of videos on your site...I can't wait to see what video you post first...perhaps some singing elves? ;-)

[Candy lives in California with her husband, 2 boys, and dog. Aside from being wife, mom, teacher, crafter, web guru and all around doer extraordinaire she manages her own business, Candied Fabrics. You can read her blog here.]