A while back, I tried to paste in YouTube code into my WordPress blog and discovered because I use the “Visual Editor”, it would mess up my whole template. I also discovered that when I moved from Blogger to WordPress all my carefully pasted videos, were gone or messed up.

To add the YouTube code, I had two choices. Use the text editor OR install a plug-in. Now, I’m proficient enough with a text editor, but I still like to be able to quickly preview the end result.

If you want to know how to switch to a text editor, there are full instructions on the FAQ.

Instead, I chose the WP YouTube plug-in. Not only can I paste in the YouTube videos easily, I can make my videos look pretty darned snazzy and match my purdy blog. You can set up multiple profiles that allow you to change the appearance of your videos through your control panel.

You can name the tag what you want, specify the size (IMPORTANT on this very narrow blog) and specify the colors. Then when you’re ready to post videos, all you need is the ID of the YouTube video (not the whole copy and paste code). For example the ID is shown in red below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjYT5OLoR8U

Then you simply take that ID and surround it with the label you set out in the profile.

Ex.

[your_tagname]YjYT5OLoR8U[/your_tagname]

The it turns out pretty nice like this below:

More information on this handy plug-in is here.

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