Yesterday I went though some of my past posts, some of them only contain a video I found on YouTube or Vimeo. Since I haven’t been paying attention to my blog, some of these embeded videos were not working. They relied on a WordPress Plugin that might have been disabled on my blog during an update or two.

As far as I know there are two ways to fix my broken videos.

Option 1 — Enable the plugin again

Go and reactive the plugin by going to:
Dashboard → Posts → Plugins

The plugin is called “Viper’s Video Quicktags 6.2.17″

This works but it might break in the future again. However it is quite easy to fix.

Option 2 — Not rely on the plugin

This is the fix that I went with. It meant that I had to go back to each post that I found had a broken video and replaced this

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6nO5RZLjdw[/youtube]

with something like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6nO5RZLjdw

This new method is a really easy way to embed videos.

Instead of relying on a plugin I just pasted the url to the YouTube, Vimeo or Flickr page
and WordPress inserts the proper embed code instead of the url. I have to admit it is a bit like magic.

Here is an example:

http://vimeo.com/4446890

That’s all you need to do. So next time you want to post a quick video into you blog just copy and paste the url of the youtube page you are on into a new post and WordPress will do its part to embed the video properly.

This works because WordPress supports Oembed.
Here is a bit more information on how you can use it and what websites are supported.

And now for your entertainment, another video by the talented David Ko. Enjoy.

Customizing your blog can be fun. Take it from me, I have probably switched between themes more often then I have written blog posts.

Here is a quick overview of how I achieve the current look using the new WordPress default theme TwentyTen.

Step 1

Enable Custom CSS. Go to Dashboard → Posts → Plugins and active Simpler CSS 0.5

This will give you access to Dashboard → Appearance → Custom CSS

Step 2

Copy and Paste the following CSS in to your Custom CSS.

#site-description{width:300px;}
#site-title { width:640px;}
#branding img{ display:none; }
#access{ margin:-85px auto 10px; background:none; }
#access .menu-header ul, div.menu ul{ float:right; }
#wrapper{ margin:20px 0 0 10px; border-right:10px solid #D9D8C4; }

#content, #content input, #content textarea {
 font-size:12px;
 line-height:18px;
 font-family:"Lucida Grande","Lucida Sans Unicode",sans-serif;
}
#access ul li.current_page_item  a{ background:#333;}

Step 3

Go ahead and change the background color to #EEECD6
You can do that under Dashboard → Appearance → Background