The final code that you will be using should look something like this:
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rWl4y1-rdMw?rel=0;3&autohide=1&showinfo=0" frameborder="0" width="635" height="353"></iframe>
*Note: The Youtube URL, Width, and Height will vary.
The part that needs to be added to the URL after the “rel=0” part is this:
;3&autohide=1&showinfo=0
Youtube will automatically give you all of the code that you need for the size and showing the related videos, so we only need to worry about the part listed above for the coding part. Just paste this after the “rel=0” section.
The end result will be similar to the way the video on this page looks. The dimensions of the video fit nicely into the blog post, and there will be a simple poster frame and play button instead of displaying the video info and the play bar at the bottom. There is also no border around the frame. When the video plays, you will notice that the play bar will hide itself as you hover away, but if you hover over the video you can still change the resolution, make the video fullscreen, enable captioning, etc. When the video is paused, the video title and information are not displayed. At the end of the video, the related videos are not displayed. This keeps the focus on your blog, and prevents something coming up that you may not want to associate with your blog. It appears that the newest form of embedded Youtube videos no longer have the Youtube logo in the corner of the video anymore, so we don’t have to worry trying to remove the Youtube logo.
Thankfully, the days of the not being able to edit the way your embedded Youtube videos look are apparently gone. For those who want to further customize their embedded videos, Google has a list of several other Youtube Embedded Player Parameters.
If your website looks the same on a smartphone as it does on a computer, you’ve got a problem.
The latest data from a study shows that almost 25% of the 35% of Americans who own smart phones, use their phone as their primary way of accessing the Internet:
the Pew Internet Project finds that one third of American adults – 35% – own smartphones. The Project’s May survey found that 83% of US adults have a cell phone of some kind, and that 42% of them own a smartphone. That translates into 35% of all adults.
Our definition of a smartphone owner includes anyone who falls into either of the following two categories: One-third of cell owners 33% say that their phone is a smartphone. Two in five cell owners 39% say that their phone operates on a smartphone platform these include iPhones and Blackberry devices, as well as phones running the Android, Windows or Palm operating systems.
Several demographic groups have high levels of smartphone adoption, including the financially well-off and well-educated, non-whites, and those under the age of 45.
Some 87% of smartphone owners access the internet or email on their handheld, including two-thirds 68% who do so on a typical day. When asked what device they normally use to access the internet, 25% of smartphone owners say that they mostly go online using their phone, rather than with a computer. While many of these individuals have other sources of online access at home, roughly one third of these “cell mostly” internet users lack a high-speed home broadband connection.
via Smartphone Adoption and Usage | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.
The use of WordPress as a CMS (content management system) makes it easy to have your content display one way for a computer screen and a different way for a phone or tablet through the use of simple plugins.
- For tablets, OnSwipe is a solid solution that gives your site a magazine feel.
- For phones, WPTouch is a bit of a pain to configure but does the job.
There are also some themes that are purely built for mobile, but, that’s information for another post.
Guy Kawasaki basically created the term “evangelist” in the business world- as the original Macintosh Evangelist for Apple. He’s written books on it- and become a serial entrepreneur. I remember a quote from one of his books- “Advertising is the plastic surgery of business, it makes the old and ugly new and pretty.”
He posted tips on how to blog a long time ago (2006)- I prefer to not even think of a blog as a blog anymore- it’s just a website using a great easy to use Content Management System that happens to put things in reverse chronological order by default (you can change almost anything you want about how your site displays in WordPress- so don’t get hung up on this).
Here are a few that I really like:
1. Think “book” not “diary.” First, a bit of philosophy: my suggestion is that you think of your blog as a “product.” A good analogy is the difference between a diary and a book. When you write a diary, it contains your spontaneous thoughts and feelings. You have no plans for others to read it. By contrast, if you write a book, from day one you should be thinking about spreading the word about it. If you want to evangelize your blog, then think “book” not “diary” and market the heck out of it.
2. Answer the little man. Now that you’re thinking of your blog as a product, ask yourself if it’s a good product. A useful test is to imagine that there’s a little man sitting on your shoulder reading what you’re writing. Every time you write an entry, he says, “So what? Who gives a shiitake?” If you can’t answer the little man, then you don’t have a good blog/product. Take it from someone who’s tried: It’s tough to market crap, so make sure you have something worth saying. Or, write a diary and keep it to yourself.
3. Collect email addresses. The first piece of advice that I give authors who want to evangelize their book is to accumulate email addresses. (The second piece of advice is to start blogging before the book comes out.) When I launched The Art of the Start, I sent out email to 95,000 people who had made contact with Garage in the past nine years by attending our conferences, submitting business plans, … whatever. Also a team of student interns compiled a database of every entrepreneurial organization on the planet for me.
5. Scoop stuff. There’s a very interesting honor system in blogging. Suppose Blogger A finds an obscure article and posts it to his blog. Blogger B reads about it on Blogger A’s blog and links to it. However Blogger B doesn’t link only to the article; she also links to Blogger A to give him credit for finding the article.
6. Supplement other bloggers with a followup entries. Read the blogs of the top fifty or so bloggers (using Technorati’s ranking is fine) and see if you have in-depth knowledge about their topics. Then instead of leaving the typical, dumb shiitake comment (“I think you’re an orifice who shouldn’t make money recommending products that you’ve invested in.”), craft a real essay that complements the blogger’s entry.
7. Acknowledge and respond to commenters. Only good things can happen when you read all the comments in your blog and respond to them. It makes commenters return to your blog. This, in turn, makes commenters feel like they are part of your blog’s community which makes them tell more people to read your blog.
(I’d like to do this better, but I’ve created a monster. I don’t have any quantitative evidence, but it sure seems like a I get large volume of comments to my entries. There are days that I simply can’t keep up, so forgive me.)
8. Ask for help. If you are providing value in your blog, don’t hesitate to ask for your readers to help. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. You don’t have to be as blatant as I am in the desire to climb Technorati’s ranking, but in a perfect world, you provide something in your blog and your readership will want to reciprocate by helping you spread the word.
9. Be bold. I’m not saying you should intentionally piss other bloggers off, but if you can’t speak your mind on your own blog, we might as well all give up and stay on the porch. This is a fascinating thing about blogging: Even when people torch you, they link to your site. I would have thought that you don’t link. My logic was: Why give someone you torched any exposure?
via How to Change the World: The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog.
Of course, since I provide a link- you can go read the others.
Here is a link to the Blogstarter Squidoo: http://www.squidoo.com/blogstarter
Of course, we give you an awesome start to this in the Websitetology seminar. So we hope you internalize all this- then join the world wide web and let your voice be heard.
Evangelize something- a cause, yourself, your business. It pays off.
And- make sure your passion comes through, because, if you love it- others will too.