About Those Embeds

I love long holiday weekends, they’re the perfect time for people to dump shit on you without anyone much noticing.

In its continuing campaign of convincing us that Google == Evil (that’s how you write an equation test folks, anything else is just an assignment of value) YouTube is once again ignoring the not inconsiderable universe of people who use e-bay and decided to only provide <iframe> embed codes for their videos.

Unfortunately this is also a problem for us.

Only lofty Admins like me (and make no mistake, I’m about as lofty as you get here so don’t fuck with me if you know what’s good for you) can directly embed <iframes> and while you may in an egalitarian way say-

ek, why not just make everyone an Admin?

Well, it’s not just that I’m an authoritarian asshole but there are plenty of buttons you can push that screw things up and the reason I know that is because I’ve pushed them.

Now we are in communications with our software providers, the kind, patient, and understanding people at Soapblox to correct this condition but in the mean time I’d like to thank BobbyK for finding a temporary fix-

Cut and paste the first thing you see when you go to YouTube and hit Embed just as you would to post to Facebook, in this case-

http://youtu.be/OMOVFvcNfvE

into the Generator.  Now delete that part which always says-

http://youtu.be/

and push the Generate! button.  You’ll come out with a piece of crap that looks like this-

<object width=”475″ height=”381″><param value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/OMOVFvcNfvE&showsearch=0&rel=0&fs=1&autoplay=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ name=”movie” /><param value=”window” name=”wmode” /><param value=”true” name=”allowFullScreen” /><embed width=”475″ height=”381″ wmode=”window” allowfullscreen=”true” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/OMOVFvcNfvE&showsearch=0&fs=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″></embed></object><br /><a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMOVFvcNfvE” target=”_blank”>View on YouTube</a>

Which will pretty much work fine if you cut and paste it as is OR you can be a little fussier like me and strip away all the non-essential garbage (everything that’s not between <embed> and </embed>) and end up with something like this.

<embed width=”475″ height=”381″ wmode=”window” allowfullscreen=”true” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/OMOVFvcNfvE&showsearch=0&fs=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″></embed>

QED

Eventually I’ll get around to posting it as a permanent link under Menu, but you might want to bookmark it now anyway.