How to add Vimeo videos to a WordPress.com blog

One limitation of a blog hosted on WordPress.com rather than an installation of WordPress via a web hosting company is that any code that you paste into the editor that contains JavaScript or embedded objects is usually sanitised for security reasons. That’s fair enough and the editor does allow video from YouTube, Google Video and Daily Motion to be easily added.

It’s not a documented feature, but by using a similar convention you can very very easily add Vimeo videos as well. Why would you want to? Well, it depends on the audience for your blog, but the content on Vimeo is original and very high quality. It’s free to set up an account and you can upload 500Mb of video per week.

So how do you add content from Vimeo to your WordPress.com blog? Easy. First of all you’ll need the to get video number from Vimeo site. That’ll be something like www.vimeo.com/123456. Take the number from the end of the URL, the 123456 part, and then type the following in your blog post, replacing 123456 with your own video number. You also need to remove the spaces that I have placed after the opening square bracket and before the closing square bracket.

[ vimeo vimeo.com/123456 ]

That’s all there is to it. When you preview or publish the post, the Vimeo information will be embedded into your post and will be ready for your readers to watch.

And so now you know, here’s a quick example of just how good Vimeo looks.

If you want to know more about the differences between a self-hosted wordpress blog and one hosted at wordpress.com you can get more details in this article at webglossary.co.uk.

Filed under: Free Software, How To Manage A Website, Support Articles , media, surfing, video, vimeo, wordpress

Make Sure You Have The Right Feed

This is just a quick service announcement to make sure that people are subscribed to the correct feed.

I’ll be moving this blog to it’s own domain in a couple of months and it’s important to be subscribed to the feed via FeedBurner to avoid any interruption in service.

You can grab the feed here. http://feeds.feedburner.com/Blueclock

Filed under: Support Articles , feed, rss, subscribe

AIR For JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide Released Free Of Charge

Yesterday’s post looked at how Ext JS were using AIR for their library documentation. Today, it’s back to documentation about AIR.

Adobe and O’Reilly have released the AIR For JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide

It’s free and 204 pages of great material useful for all levels of developers. If you know nothing about AIR, it’ll get you started, but the final chapter, Adobe Air Mini Cookbook is the one that will probably appeal to developers that have a handle on AIR and want to jump straight in to working with databases, figure out how to deploy AIR applications or work with file uploads etc.

Grab it now. It’ll get you a long way down the road to taking all your existing web developer skills and adding desktop applications to your skillset.

Filed under: Adobe Air, Support Articles , Adobe Air, air documentation, air pdf

Browser Caching Tip

Here’s a quick tip for web developers. If you’ve made changes to your CSS or JavaScript but you’re not seeing the results that you expected and you’re sure that your code is correct, try forcing a page refresh.

You don’t have to empty the browser cache, just use the following key combinations:

IE : Ctrl F5

Safari : Ctrl + r

Firefox, Mozilla et al: Ctrl + Shift + r

Opera : Ctrl F5 or Ctrl + r

Apple users replace Ctrl with Cmd.

Filed under: Support Articles, Web Browsers , browser shortcuts

Update to Safari 3.1.1. Now

Apple have released an update to Safari 3.1 which patches a security hole.

If you’re using Safari on Windows you can get the latest update by going to Start > All Programs > Apple Software Update.

You’ll be required to reboot your machine.

Filed under: Apple, Free Software, Safari, Support Articles, Web Browsers , safari 3.1.1

Lightning 0.8 Release

I’ve been out of the office all day at the Adobe AIR On Tour Event in Brussels, but given the way the stats have rocketed for Lightning related articles on this blog it looks like Mozilla have finally released v0.8 of Lightning for Thunderbird and there might be the odd problem with tasks

I’ve been using the nightly builds of Lightning 0.8 and the Google Data Provider 0.4 for a few weeks now and I know there’s a lot of good stuff in there so it’ll be good to check out the final release tomorrow and see what the problem is (hopefully none or at least easy to fix).

I’ll post more tomorrow.

Filed under: Free Software, Support Articles, Thunderbird , lightning, mozilla, task management, Thunderbird