How to Embed a Youtube Video Cleanly to Your Blog

The video above shows you how to embed Youtube videos to your blog effectively and cleanly. Specifically, what we will be doing is resizing the video to fit into our blog nicely, making the play bar hide itself, removing the distracting information at the top left corner of the embedded video, and removing the related videos at the end. The process is very simple, using only a few modifications.

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&amp;autohide=1&amp;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&amp;autohide=1&amp;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.

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How to downgrade iOS4 to 3.1.3 on iPhone 3G

Frankly, I think there needs to be a class actions suit against Apple- for making a software upgrade that you can’t *officially* revert from.

After “upgrading” to iOS4 my 3G iPhone bricked. Went into an infinite loop on sync- so that my contacts would never load- nor anything else.

To make matters worse- after a few tries- Apple Mobile Sync overwrote my immediate backup of data.

This nightmare started on Tuesday 22 July at 10am. I worked until 1:30 AM to try to restore. In the morning- I called Apple- and spent over 6+ hours on the phone with support. They told me there was no way to go back to iPhone 3.1.3 and restore my data from an older backup that I had from CC Cloner. The only hope was to get iOS4 to play nice with my phone and – then reinstall from iTunes- losing all settings, sms, etc.

From 9am to 11:30 pm I worked on my phone. They tried to tell me it was corrupt data in my Contacts- which I spent hours “grooming” and “cleaning”- yet- the reality is that same data had worked with my old OS- and it STILL worked with my iPad.

After watching many comments deleted on the Apple discussion forums- including people who said it was possible to do the downgrade- recovery- I found the right stuff.

Here are my steps:

Adapted from http://www.addictivetips.com/mobile/downgrade-iphone-3g-3gs-from-ios-4-to-3-1-2/ THANKS!

Step 1) Download iTunes 9.2 version (current version)

Step 2) Plug in the iPhone to PC/Mac

Step 3) Put the iPhone in DFU mode (MUST BE IN TRUE DFU MODE) Screen should be black but still be showing up in itunes with a warning “iPhone is detected in recovery mode” To go into DFU mode- press both buttons for exactly 10 seconds then release top- and hold the home button for exactly 10 seconds- screen will be black-

Step 4) Download a legit version of an older ipsw from Apple untouched

http://www.redmondpie.com/download-iphone-os-3.1.3-firmware-9140418/

http://appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/content.info.apple.com/iPhone/061-7468.20100202.pbnrt/iPhone1,2_3.1.3_7E18_Restore.ipsw

Step 5) In iTunes- Option- click-restore on MAC, or Shift-click-restore on WIN for iPhone and select the Legit Apple firmware 3.1.3 you downloaded in step 4.

Step 6) Watch how Apple confirms that its legit Firmware your trying to restore to on their servers, (HAHA cause its Legit software from Apple so why wouldn’t they let you DOWN Grade to it) The Firmware then gets applied to your iPhone watch as the progress bar moves across and no error pop up.

Step 7) After the restore finishes you should be hit with a 1015 error. That’s expected. Your phone should be in Recovery mode now and iTunes will tell you to restore again. Click OK then hold option + click on restore again – this time you do not have to go into DFU mode – and navigate to the 3.1.3 FW.

At the end- you’ll get yet another 1015 error- you can ignore it.

Step 8) Success! You just took your iPhone3G from iOS4 to 3.1.3 Firmware!!!

Then do backup to your old data from an 3.1.3 backup- from time machine- or a CC cloner copy – hopefully you find it in the same place you have to place it:

put it in LIbrary/Application Support/Mobile sync on a Mac- (Sorry, I don’t know where it goes on a PC) The file will have a super funky name- looks like encrypted code

Do a restore.

The restore will take hours- but in the end- no brick. Hopefully I can save you some time.

Apple really needs to do two things: Make the process easy to revert- and to lock the backup from any major upgrade so you don’t lose it in the infinite loop that happened to a lot of people with this upgrade.

UPDATE: 25 JUN 2010 another option using another software tool, iRecovery: http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/downgrade_iphone_os_40_beta_back_iphone_os_313 note- this was used with Beta’s of iOS4.

After my revert- I’m still running version 3.1.3 (7E18) and Modem Firmware 05.13.04 Supposedly- the modem firmware is what “can’t be downgraded” and won’t work- however, my 3g iPhone seems to be working fine (thankfully). I won’t upgrade again until ios4.0.1 is released.

UPDATE: Jun 27- here is an illustrated guide via LifeHacker: http://lifehacker.com/5572003/how-to-downgrade-your-iphone-3g

and – btw- Apple support still won’t tell you this can be done.

28 Jun: a tip from Apple support forums if you want to be brave before iOS4.0.1 upgrade is up:

1. Full manual backup of iPhone (speed up by removing unnecessary app, music, video etc.)
2. Copy the backup from ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup to (very) safe place - this is for possible fail
3. Uncheck the Address Book sync in iTunes; select Removing contacts from iPhone
4. Sync; after sync the Contacts on the iPhone has to be empty; check it
5. Remove the previous backup and perform full manual backup again; this create fresh backup without data with contacts
6. Install iOS 4 via Restore procedure
7. Restore data from backup - this is THE moment! It should end this time without infinity loop
8. If restore from backup is OK, switch on the sync with Address Book in iTunes
9. Sync; after this sync the Contacts should be restored too

Update- 22 AUG 2010- Apple’s Steve Jobs supposedly says there will be a fix for iOS4 on the 3G

Here is a parody video- and, hey- at least his phone didn’t brick:

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Converting static sites to WordPress with SiteSucker

First of all, this post is only for those of you using a Mac. I’m sure there are a ton of tools out there for PC (because I had to sort through them before finding this one)- but for downloading an entire site for “offline browsing”- or moving files to use in your new content management system, this post is for you.

After a bit of search, I found Sitesucker. It’s shareware, and probably worth a few bucks to toss the developers way. It will download all the pages, images, everything you need to take that awful static site and make it look good in your new WordPress site.

For those of us who try to move clients who don’t know their HTML from their Hosting- it can be a real blessing. Sure, I’d love to have FTP access to a site- but in just a few minutes I’ve got all the stuff I need so the old host can take it down and I can put up the new.

Warning- it won’t help you with flash sites.

It also won’t copy the backend code you need to run a form- or any other cool stuff, but for a reference of what they had, to where you are taking them- this is the tool.

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