How To Embed YouTube Videos

Writing a blog is fun, adding pictures is even more fun, adding videos is like a party on your screen. Blogger makes it easy to add pictures, but it's not so cut and dry to add a video. I see a lot of blogs that use links to videos instead of embedding the video on their blog, why send your readers away when you can make the video play directly from your site? Fortunately YouTube makes it very simple. Here's what you do. First pick out the video you wish to add from YouTube, next you look just to the right of the YouTube video (below any advertisement they may have there), you will see this,

See where it says "Embed"? This is what we want, now click on the icon just to the right of the embeded text, this will open up an options box, here you can decide how you want the video to look on your site. Your options are, Include related videos, Show border and Enable privacy-enhanced mode.

You can choose whether or not this video, while on your site will show related videos, show border is just that, it shows the border if checked, I usually leave it unchecked, the third option determines if and when a cookie gets set on your viewer's computer. It's up to you if you want to choose this or not.

Your second set of options is the color scheme, I usually leave it on the first option, but if you want to color coordinate it you can choose another color.

The final option is the size of the player screen, I usually choose the second one, though it's up to you what size you want the player to be. Just remember, you should make it fit your blog, if the player is larger (wider) than the text area of your blog, it will overlap into your sidebar and will look amateurish.

Once you have these options picked out, put your cursor on the text to the right of the embed text, this will highlight the text, then press "ctrl c" on your keyboard, this will copy the code.

At this point I assume you will have started your blog post, if not, do so now. Go ahead and write whatever it is you want to write about. Now, look to the upper right of the text box where you are writing, see the tab that says "Edit HTML"? Click on that, once it is opened, you will see what you have been writing, but things may look a bit different, you will see some HTML code along with what you have been writing. Don't worry about it, just scroll down to where you have finished writing, put your cursor on the screen and click, now using your keyboard, press "ctrl v", this will paste the code from the YouTube page that you previously copied, if it doesn't work, don't worry, just go back to your YouTube video and copy the code next to the word "embed" by highlighting it and pressing "ctrl c" on your keyboard, go back to your blog post, be sure you are in the "Edit HTML" tab. click your cursor on the screen where you want to embed your video and press "ctrl v" to paste the code. Now on the upper right of the screen, press "Compose", now you will see a gray box that will have the word "object" written inside. This is where your video will appear within the text of your post, you can move it if you want, you can also make it left, right or center aligned, just double click on the gray box and choose the appropriate alignment tab on the toolbar above.




For those who like playing with the code, you can customize your player even further than the options allowed on YouTube. For instance, here is a copy of the code, you can edit the width and height to suit your needs, notice that the width and height are in 2 different places in the code, be sure to change it in both places, make it match by making the width on both places the same, and make the height on both places the same. You also want to make proportional changes, if you change the width by 10% then you need to change the height by the same percentage otherwise your video may look strange. You can also double click on the gray box, grab one corner (your cursor will change into a double ended arrow) and drag the video to whatever size you want, hold the "crtl" button as you do it and the size change will remain proportional.

This one has the border enabled, along with the colors chosen, you can change the border colors to something besides what YouTube offers, you will need to know the hexadecimal code for the colors you want, it's not as hard as it sounds, here is a great link with the hex colors you can choose from, click here.

The highlighted part of the code is what you want to play with, ignore the 0x in front of each one, you only need to be concerned with the 6 number and letter code that comes after, this is computer-speak for the colors in the border of your YouTube video on your site. Notice there are 4 places where this code appears, note that the first and third are the same, and the second and fourth are the same, when you change the first one, be sure to make the first and third match, do the same for the second and fourth, they need to be the same. Make these changes in the "Edit HTML" tab, delete the original 6 digit hex color and type in the one you want to replace it with, be sure to do it in both places to match.

Play with it, have fun, embed videos until your heart's content. Enjoy!





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Wretha,
properly pronounced wreetha, (included for the text reader),


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