Blog Technical Support, Part I: Video
My wonderful Aunt Jill (of Wayne and Jill fame) left a recent comment asking “How do you add videos to your blog?” It’s a great question, so I thought I’d start a mini-series here on the old Tolhouse blog I’m calling Blog Technical Support. The first installment is: Video!
It’s actually a lot easier than you might think. Here’s the process:
- Capture some video. We use our handy little Canon Powershot A610 for all the video you see here.
- (Optional) Edit your video. Being a Mac guy, I use iMovie. If you’re into Windows, you could try Windows Movie Maker. Editing is beyond the scope of this post, but if you’re interested, let me know, and I can blog about that, too.
- Save your video someplace on your computer.
- Create an account on YouTube. (You could also try Revver, Blip.tv, or Ourmedia. But we’re going to stick YouTube for this little tutorial.) Make sure you confirm your email address.
- Go to the Upload Video page. Give your video a title, a description, and some tags. Then pick a category and choose your language. Finally, click on Go Upload a Video buton.
- Upload your video. Click on the Browse button and pick your video file. Unless you have a good reason to leave it private, I would suggest keeping the “Broadcast” option set to public. Then click Upload.
- Go have a cup of coffee while the video uploads. I find humming the “Jeopardy” theme song helps, too. Er… not really. That was just a little joke.
- Actually, you can take this time to start a new blog post for your video.
- After the video is uploaded, it’s time to embed your video into your blog post. Copy the contents of the “Embed the video on your website or blog” box. To do this, select the text with your mouse, and push Control-C (That’s the Control key with the C key) to copy the text. By the way, you can always find this code again on your My video page.
- Paste the text into your blog. Push Control-V to paste it in. Save your post.
- You’re done! Note that it might take a few minutes for YouTube to finish converting your video, so if it doesn’t show up right away, don’t worry. Give it a few minutes, and you’ll be good to go