An American in Jordan

Those of you who have chosen Wordpress as your blog software of choice may have realized, at one point or another, that Wordpress does not necessarily get along with YouTube embedded videos. Apparently Wordpress’ WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor is to blame as it does not like strange things embedded it. Unfortunately, YouTube videos are one of those things! If you haven’t yet experienced this bug, just wait. One day you’ll visit your blog only to find out that the design is completely borked by “misplaced” object or embed tags in the code.

This is a known issue (read bug) that is currently being worked on by the Wordpress team. Until it is fixed, however, there are two solutions to this issue. The first is to type your post in the Code tab in the Wordpress editor, pasting your YouTube embed code within, and hit publish. The problem is that you can never edit that post in WYSIWYG mode again; otherwise Wordpress will strip out the code or just plain screw it up.

The second solution is to install Paul Bain’s Easy Tube plugin:

1. Download the .zip file andextract the contents to your Wordpress plugins folder (located in your blog’s root-folder > wp-content > plugins).
2. Log into your WP-admin and activate the EasyTube plugin from the Plugins control panel.
3. To embed a video in your post, write “youtube:” followed by the URL of the video. Enclose this line in square brackets and you’re done. It should look something like this:
4. Remember to use the URL of the video, not the embed code!

The code can be written in either the Visual or Code tabs of the Wordpress editor and the result is a valid page containing your video. There are also options that allow you to adjust the width, height and autoplay parameters.