Many YouTube videos have a little box on the right that says "URL" and "Embed". If you select all the text in the Embed box, turn off rich-text editing, and paste that text into your post, it should display and play the video.

On Google video, there's a link with "+Video" in the box on the top right of the page - if you click that a window opens up with similar code you can copy and paste to embed the video.

If you want to do this with some other video you found on the web, you need to understand more about what's going on. You might start by going to YouTube, copying both the "URL" information and the "Embed" information and pasting them into a word processor. If you look at them for a minute, you'll see that the "URL" information is the same as what's in the address window of your browser when you are playing the video. If you look carefully at the Embed information, you'll find that URL information twice in it, but slightly altered. (The ?v= in the address window has been changed to /v/ and &hl=en&fs=1 has been added to the very end.) If you get to where you can play the other video, copy the URL information from the address window in your browser, replace the URL info in your sample of the embed tags from YouTube with the new URL info, check for those two alterations, and then paste the revised code into your post, it might work...

If you want or need to know more, I think you'll probably need to Google something like "embed video html" without the quotes. You'll get lots of tutorials about these tags and what each piece of them does. There are a lot of ways to do this, and some complications about what works or doesn't work with different browsers, though...

Best,
Thad

A pretty confusing label. A "book" is just a section of OlyBlog like this one you're looking at; on OlyBlog, "Books" are collections of posts set up so other people are supposed to be able to add entries to the collection, edit what's there, move things around, etc. (So far, nobody's tried doing those collaborative things, so I don't even know if they actually can.)

OlyBlog inherited this confusing term from Drupal, the open source content management software that keeps track of and displays all the content for the blog.

Best,
Thad

First, you have to have a picture that's on-line somewhere. You can't upload one to OlyBlog directly, except for a picture of yourself in your account.

But you can include a picture that's on some other website. You can put the picture on your own webspace, if you have any. (You may well have some free web space if you have high speed Internet.) Or you can open an account on some free on-line photo sharing service like Flickr or Photobucket or Picasa, upload your photo there, and then include it. (I don't use a service like this, but other users may have advice about the pros and cons of different sites?

You need the actual address of the photo itself - not just the page it's on.

If you have that, and you're tagging yourself, you just put <img src="http://yourphotoaddress..."> in where you'd like it displayed. If you have rich-text enabled, you click the icon of a tree to get a little "Insert/edit Image" dialog window, and then you type or paste your photo's web address into the "Image URL" field in that window. (The editor will also give you a lot of options about adding a border, moving the image around on the page, changing the amount of white space between the image and the text, etc.) Here again, playing around when you aren't trying to actually get something posted and looking at the results of various choices using Preview may be the most enjoyable way to learn about the many options the editor offers.

If the actual web address of the image itself isn't obvious, you can use the View menu on your web browser and choose Page Source. This will give you a window, and it will probably look like a mess - pages of codes and tagging. But don't despair. Use Find and search for ".jpg", then go through the window with Find Next, looking for the photo you want. If you don't have any luck, try ".gif" and ".png".

I try to remember to type anything that might be long or complicated into a simple word processor and then paste it into the Body window when I want to post, just so I don't have to start over if I go to some other page and lose what I was typing by accident. By simple, I mean something like WordPad or Text-Edit; if the word processor's set to use curvy quotation marks and asterisks instead of simple straight ones, for example, they'll show up as weird symbols on some people's machines.

Every Body window, where you can type what you actually want to say, has a link underneath labeled "enable rich text". If you click on that, you get a little menu with buttons above the window; they let you format what you're writing by adding italics, creating links, inserting pictures, and so on. If you pause the cursor above each button, a little label that tells you what it does shows up. Usually, you use the button by selecting some piece of text and then clicking the button to format it in one way or another. If this sounds good to you, I'd suggest enabling rich text, typing in a few lines of "The quick fox jumped over the lazy dog," and just fooling around trying out buttons and getting a sense of what they do. It will be more fun than trying to learn it while you're actually trying to say things too.

Enabling rich text lets you do a number of things just by clicking buttons, which is nice, but it doesn't always do what you want it to, which is not nice. And it adds a lot of hypertext markup language (HTML) tags to your text which look like gobbledgook to you if you try to edit the text afterwards and you're just getting started blogging.

This book offers technical advice about how to do things on OlyBlog. It's a collaborative project; if you've got questions you'd like answered, please email Thad Curtz. If you know how to do something that you think other people might like to do, feel free to add a page about that to this book.

If you think you can improve an advice page that's already been written, please feel free to add your comments and advice. Please don't just change what somebody else has said, at least not for now; let's see how just adding comments, suggestions and corrections works for a while.