Magic Satchel, Inc. » video blogging

Embed a YouTube Video in Wordpress Without Going Insane

Kim — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:26:13 +0000

It’s one of those bloggy quirks. You’ve done it 80 times before, even like, once last week at least. But you’ve gone and forgotten how to embed a video again. Relax. Bookmark this page.

Go to the video’s page and get the embed code there. Pretend Wordpress doesn’t have a button to embed YouTube videos. Just ignore it forever, because that button will cause you nothing but grief. As an added bonus, you can customize the appearance of the video border to match your blog. Nifty!

But oh, no! The video is too small when small and too big when bigger. What to do? In the embed code, go to this part:

“true” width=”660″ height=”525″>

Open up your little calculator widget and divide each number by, for example 75 or 125%. Then replace those numbers with their reduced/opposite of reduced numbers. There. Easy, right?

(The comic is a classic from XKCD, one of my favorite sites.)

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Too Much Twitter?

Kim — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:09:30 +0000

This funny video (warning- mild profanity, may be NSFW), while overlooking Twitter’s better points, is pretty funny.

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Via Twitter, why being a WAHM is bad

Kim — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 04:19:29 +0000

I see this a lot, in real life and online. There’s a local hair salon with a ridiculous name. I won’t mention it for obvious reasons, but every time I pass it, I think about how silly the name is. That, and their “Grand Opening” sign was misspelled and displayed for months.

While I was skimming the local paper last week, I came across the salon’s half page ad. Half of the half page ad was devoted to explaining the business name- I’m guessing they get that question a lot. Valuable ad space-paid for ad space- that could be talking up the business was instead devoted to something completely unrelated to what the business will do for you. Customers don’t care about your business name, your kids, or much outside the value and service you being to them. Which brings me to this video.

Virtual Assistants are, in my unscientific observations, largely female. Many proudly boast of being work-at-home moms, or WAHMs. Being able to juggle a life and a successful business is noteworthy, but not to your clients. If anything, it communicates to them that your priority may not be their business. And that is bad, bad, bad.

So before you go tagging and boxing yourself, take a look at this clip and really think about your message. Is it relevant to the service or product you offer? I’m really, really into the guacamole from Chipotle. I could eat it daily, on almost everything savory I eat. However, nowhere in my marketing materials do I mention guacamole.

Scott Stratten on Why Being a WAHM is Bad for Business from Jessica Knows on Vimeo.

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Cool Brain Tricks: Synaesthesia

Kim — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 23:23:32 +0000

Although fairly few people are truly synaesthetic, I found this video blog* on CNN to be really interesting. While most of us (myself included) can’t identify with the complexity of synaesthesia, it’s still pretty cool when a scent triggers a memory or vice versa.

I personally avoid most video stories, but I find the CNN iReports to be pretty interesting. This one in particular is very well narrated and engaging.

*Opens to a video player.

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