Burtis talked about this. I thought I’d spell it out with pictures.

There are a number of ways to get media into WordPress. One that you DON’T want to do is just list the URL, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C_k7CxlvZ8

Readers could get to the video I posted with that, but they’d have to copy the URL and paste it in the address bar. A better way would be to link it, like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C_k7CxlvZ8

You can do that with the link button on the formatting toolbar

If you go into the Text setting

you can see what the underlying code is

You don’t really need to know HTML code for this course, but I think it’s cool to look at how these things work.

The ideal way to do it is to embed the media. With Youtube videos, click on the Share button

to get the Embed code

I copied and pasted that into the Text view of my last post to embed the video. Flickr, Twitter and Soundcloud will all give you an embed code. There are WordPress plugins that might make the process a little simpler, but I like going into the code.

The benefit of embedding is that you can include your commentary and analysis on the same page as the media you’re discussing. It gives your words more power and context.

I also found out as I was doing this post that putting the full URL to the video on its own line will embed the video. I guess something changed since the last time I tried that.