Blog Potions

What you’re seeing on the left is a youtube video showing Ramiele Malubay’s audition in the Season 7 of American Idol. This video is also used in one of my posts on my personal blog. If you think that I’m trying to make too much senseless babbles here, you’re probably right but that is not what this post is about.

Did you ever wonder why you could not resize or text-align your YouTube videos in your posts? Well, I don’t know too but I finally got a solution to tweak your way into creative resizing and positioning of youtube videos into your wordpress blog posts.

Required tools

1. My Video plugin by Levi Putna.
2. Hard code for left-aligned table as this:

<table border=”0″ align=”left” width=”249″ cellPadding=”0″ cellSpacing=”5″>
<tr>
<td>My Video Code goes here</td>
</tr>
</table>

Do I need to elaborate on the table styling? If yes, I’ll be obliged.

2.1 border – used to specify the thickness of table borders, zero is for none while any other number is for the opposite of none.
2.2 align – defines the table alignment, “left” is for left and “right” is for right. Can you guess what “center” is for?
2.3 width – I set my videos to have a width of 239 pixels so I’m leaving a 10-pixel space allowance.
2.4 cellPadding – is for cell padding
2.5 cellSpacing – is for cell spacing.

I’m afraid I can’t elaborate on the difference between cell padding and cell spacing? Post a comment if I need to.

Procedures

1. Download, upload and activate the My Video plugin in your wordpress (this is a no-brainer so I don’t need to see anyone nosebleeding).
2. Go to options page and modify the video size. Levi Putna has a better way of explaining things here.
3. Create a wordpress entry and insert your table code wherever you want.
4. Go check your youtube video and copy the reference code. Levi Putna has explained it already but just so we could all live happily ever-after, I’ll be obliged to say it again.

Say for example, your video URL is this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1feRqEvCV0
You only need to copy the part in bold letters.

5. Between your <td> </td> codes, enclose your “My Video” code. Like this:

<table border=”0″ align=”left” width=”249″ cellPadding=”0″ cellSpacing=”5″>
<tr>
<td>[youtube]u1feRqEvCV0[?youtube]</td>
</tr>
</table>

6. Diversify.

Practical applications

Enhance your video embedding within posts by having it positioned and resize the way you do to your embedded images. You don’t always want your videos centered within your post in huge default sizes, do you?