The Blogware Mechanic is a series of articles that covers how to get the most out of your Blogware blog through customization. In this series, we'll look at all sorts of ways to take advantage of the flexibility of the Blogware blogging platform and make your blog better-looking, easier to use, funkier, more highly-ranked by search engines and even help make you a little money! If you have a Blogware blog and want to soup it up like those fancy “A-lister” blogs, then this series is for you.

I'm going to interrupt The Blogware Mechanic's ongoing series on customizing the look and feel of your Blogware blog to answer a question that I get asked on an increasing basis:

How do I put a YouTube video into a blog entry?

There are two ways to do it:

• By linking to the YouTube video's page (easy, not as impressive-looking)
• By embedding the YouTube video directly into your blog entry (a little more work, impressive-looking)

Linking to the YouTube Video's Page

Here's an example of linking to a YouTube video's page:

Take a look at this video of me interviewing Tucows VP Product Development, Alain Chenais, for a podacast!

If you click on the link above, you'll get taken to the page at YouTube where the video lives.

Linking to a YouTube video page is easy, because YouTube makes it easy for you to copy the page's location. If you look at the YouTube video page, you'll see a section just to the right of the video. Let's take a closer look:

This section of the page shows a lot of information about the video on the page, including its URL (or, if you prefer, “web page address”). If you click on the URL, it will be highlighted. Do this, and then copy the URL (by pressing control-c on if you use Windows or Linux, or command-c if you use Mac OS).

In the Blogware control panel, highlight the text that you want to link to the YouTube page. Then click the Link button:

A window like the one below will pop up:

Paste the URL into the text box in the pop-up window (by pressing control-v on if you use Windows or Linux, or command-v if you use Mac OS), then click the OK button. The text will now be linked to the YouTube video's page.

Linking to the YouTube Video's Page

A flashier way to include a YouTube video is to directly embed it into your blog entry. Unlike linking to the YouTube video's page, you readers don't leave your blog to see the video; it's right there, inside your entry

I've embedded a YouTube video below. If you click on either play button (the triangle pointing to the right in the center of the video or the one in the lower left-hand corner), the video will play. If you click anywhere else on the video, a new browser window or tab containing the YouTube video's page will open.

As with linking to a YouTube video, the first step is to go to the YouTube page for the video and look at the section just to the right of the video…

This time, we're interested in the Embed text field. If you click on it, it will be highlighted. Do this, and then copy the URL (by pressing control-c on if you use Windows or Linux, or command-c if you use Mac OS).

Now go to the Blogware control panel. What you do next depends on whether or not you use the Rich Text Editor to enter posts.

If you use the Rich Text Editor, you'll need to click the Mode button near the lower right-hand corner of the Article Body area so that the editor is in Source mode:

If you don't use the Rich Text Editor, you're already editing the HTML source for your blog entries and don't need to do anything special.

Now paste what you copied from the Embed text field in the YouTube page into the source of your blog entry:

The video will now be embedded in your blog entry.

Special Note for Rich Text Editor Users

The Rich Text Editor doesn't know how to display embedded YouTube videos. Here's what an embedded YouTube video looks like in the Rich Text Editor:

If you use the Rich Text Editor and want a preview of what your entry looks like with the embedded video, click the Preview button at the bottom of the page. You'll see something like this:

Posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 11:00 pm by Tucows.
Filed under: Blogware.
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