How to Insert YouTube Videos into your ActiveRain Posts - Attention Newbies!

16 years ago

Although the title of this post references newbies to ActiveRain, a couple of my non-newbie friends asked me how to compose a post using both photos and YouTube videos, so I thought this would make an interesting challenge for me to explain this in an understandable manner. This post assumes that you are not familiar with HTML at all. Wish me luck!

First, you must be familiar with inserting photos themselves, so I would recommend reading my tutorial on this topic here: How to Insert and Align Photos in Your ActiveRain Posts - Not Just for Newbies!

Once you have your post laid out and ready to go, make sure you allow a little extra space for the video to appear (I typically hit "ENTER" three times in the spot where I plan to put the video). I will explain why this is easier in a minute.

Make note of the text that appears just before the place where you want the video (e.g. "This is a great video I found about staging a home properly:" or "This song is really cool in my opinion:" or "I like videos:"). This will make it easier to find the spot to insert your video in a minute.

Next, you must first post it in "Draft" mode. Draft mode is found in the same dropdown menu that you use to select Public or Members Only, just below the tag box, which is directly under the blog entry box:

The default setting for Visibility is Public, so you must click on the dropdown menu and select Draft in this case.

As a sidenote, Associates Only doesn't work properly (at least the last time I tried it), so I would simply ignore this option for now.

Once you have titled the post, go ahead and post the entry after selecting Draft. Be careful NOT to select Groups or click any other boxes at this time. If you are a brand-new member, this button is found at the very bottom of the page when you are writing a post:

Now, you have a post which includes your text and photos (but no video yet). It should say "(Draft)" next to the title of the post.

Here comes the fun part!

The most popular video source is YouTube, but this will work for any service as long as you have the embedding code for the video copied.

Where do you find the embed code? Well, on YouTube, it appears just to the right of the video, under the date that it was added:

The long string of jibberish that appears in the white box is what you need to capture. Simply click (or maybe double click) inside the box in order to highlight the entire code, then hold down CTRL and press "C" to copy this text.

At the top of the blog entry box, you will see two tabs, one for WYSIWYG and one for HTML. Up to this point, you have been working with WYSIWYG, which stands for What You See Is What You Get.

Click on the HTML tab now, and your post will be displayed in its raw HTML state (i.e. no pretty pictures and the text looks run together). Don't panic! This is where you will need to insert the code that you captured from YouTube above.

Remember when I mentioned leaving some space for your video by hitting "ENTER" a couple of times in the post? Here's where this will come in handy.

While you are looking at the raw HTML stuff, it seems a bit daunting at first. What you need to find is the space that you allowed, just after the text describing the video. The spaces (where you hit "ENTER") will look like this (I have to spell it out for you since I can't use the tags themselves because that would just look like more space here):

open bracket-backslash-p-closed bracket-open bracket-p-closed bracket

I put the tag in the first comment on this post (below) in order to make it a bit easier to understand.

Click in the middle of the two tags, and assuming you have correctly copied the embed code, hold down "CTRL" and press "V" to insert it here.

YOU ARE FINISHED NOW!

Here is a song that I like to motivate you to create your own post with video (my good friend Jesse plays bass for Chris Tomlin and co-writes many of his songs):

Thanks for reading! Let me know if you have any questions!