Finally, my new WordPress plugin is released.

YouTube Embed does a simple job – it displays a YouTube video directly in your posts and pages.

Now, there are lots of similar plugins available but they’re either over engineered or, in some case, under engineered with missing features and no updates for years. Indeed, frustrated with some shortcomings with the plugin that I was using, it spurred me to write this one.

You’ll notice it isn’t one of my “Simple” plugins – this is because it includes options screen and various other “advanced” plugin features. It’s the first time I’ve written an options screen before. And a widget. And indeed, many of the features in this plugin, so be gentle with me!

Features include the ability to use both short codes but also to call a PHP function (for the coders our there!). You can embed both videos and playlists. You can also display video thumbnails and even fetch short YouTube URLs (recently introduced by YouTube). There’s even a widget for adding a video or playlist to your sidebar. And, naturally, the generated code is all XHTML compliant (unlike the code that YouTube provide you with!).

Download from WordPress or visit the official page on this site.

As always, let me know what you think, and feel free to send me ideas and suggestions for future enhancements.

Quick Tip!

I was using WP YouTube before – this means all my video short codes were set to [wp_youtube]. My new one, although compatible with many other plugins, uses [youtube] as a short code. Rather than edit all the posts, I simply added the following to my functions.php file within my theme folder…

add_shortcode('wp_youtube','youtube_video_sc');

You need to disable the original plugin and activate mine. This code simply gets any instances of [wp_youtube] to point to my new function.

wp_youtube, in the above code, can be replaced with any other short code.

Yea, I’ve been AWOL over Christmas and New Year. Who can blame me though? Spending some time with my family, only occasionally catching up on email.

But, now it’s 2010 and it’s time to get back to some work.

First off, some resolutions. No, not those “get fit” type of resolutions that don’t survive January. In this case, it’s my resolutions for what you’ll find coming up from this site in the coming year….

1. Less personal rants, unless it’s about customer service.

I think I’m a pretty fair minded person, and I think I’m not overly harsh with those who give bad customer service. None-the-less, more news-worthy rants (political, etc.) are going to reduce. Why? Well, take a look on any forum discussing similar subjects these days and you’ll find a plethora of ignorant views being spouted by people who think they know better than anyone else. And I don’t want to end up sounding like one of those people.

For example, I don’t wish to get into the recent announcement that people paying fines are going to pay £15 to subsidise support for victims of crime. Don’t get me wrong, I believe victims of crime should be supported and helped all they can. The thing is, people recieving fines rather than going to court are generally not those leaving behind victims. If I speed a little and get caught on a camera I’ll end up paying. If I speed and run someone over, I’ll end up in court and not have to pay. But which one involved a victim? Another well thought out piece of legislation.

Equally, I’m not going to rant about driving north up the M1 last Tuesday at 11am and finding that during the 20+ miles of 50mph restricted motorway there was not ONE workman present. Just some skips and temporary huts.

But I will rant, for example, about Phones4U who attempted to sell me a new mobile phone, claiming to buy out my existing contract and all for a fee no different to my current monthly cost. Only to find out later that they wanted to clobber me for a ridiculous amount each month in insurance.

I’ll also rant about Carphone Warehouse and Marks & Spencer, both of whom have not responded to customer service emails that I sent, oh, about 2 months ago.

That kind of thing.

2. More Android

Well, I still plan to get an Android phone next month, so expect lots of reviews and suggestions for accessories and software – the kind of thing I did when I got my Netbook.

I was thinking of turning my hand to Android apps, but I believe that they’re written in Java so I’ve suddenly gone off the idea.

3. More WordPress Plugins

Yes, they will continue and will come as a 2-prong attack.

First, I’ll be continueing to update and maintain the existing plugins – this will include planned updates to Simple Feed List, Simple Readbag List and Simple TTIW List (mainly around caching). I’m sure I’ll also be adding more shortening services to Simple URL Shortener as well.

Second, I’ll be releasing some new plugins.

At the moment I’m working on one to assist with embedding YouTube videos into your blog. Yes, yes, I know there are loads available. Indeed I have one installed for this site. However, all those I’ve come across are either way too complex for simple video embedding OR are nice and simple but have certain limitations (for example, playing HQ video).

And this plugin will not be part of the “Simple” range as it will include, amonst other things, an options screen.

There are a few of my existing plugins that would benefit from an options screen – if I add one, though, they will become a new plugin, developed side-by-side with the existing version.

I’ve also had a few calls for a personal plugin that I use to be made available. If you look in the sidebar (not sure which side, I keep changing it!) you should see a section named “Find me online”. Under that is a number of icons for social sites – click on these to display my profile for that site. I’ll (again) add an options screen and a lot more sites.

If anyone has any requests for any of these, let me know.

4. Updating the Online Tools

That online tools section of my site is currently a little under-utilised. I’d like to fix that, so I’ll be looking to add some more pages. I’ll also be updating those already there, especially the CSS compressor, after a recent review.

5. Arsing around with this blog’s layout

I’ve done it throughout 2009, so I may as well be upfront now

I use the simple, but configurable, WP YouTube plugin for WordPress to embed YouTube videos in my posts.

It hasn’t been updated since the beginning of 2008 but, hey, it works¹. Well, it did. I have a post in draft in which I wanted to embed two videos. Sadly it won’t work and it appears to be down to the use of hyphens in their ID. When you look at the source code for the resultant post something has converted the hyphens to HTML friendly characters.

So, for instance, an ID of 7Yapo–1OaE is being embedded in the code with the “double dash” converted to &#8211. The ID of oatks-1×8U8 is having the dash converted to &#215.

I’ve contacted the plugin owner, via his site, but due to the lack of recent activity on this plugin, I’m not sure what response I’ll get.

Meantime I’ve been looking at other YouTube plugins that do what I need them to do (i.e. have some basic configuration options for colour, auto-start, etc). Few have been changed recently (and therefore, I’m guessing, will have picked up on what I assume is a recent change to ID formats) and only YouTuber sprang out as being a reasonable alternative. Sadly that has the same issue, and I’ve reported that via the forum on WordPress.

I had a play with WP YouTube last night but was unable to sort the problem out – I suspect the conversion is happening to the URL before it’s being passed into the plugin. However, none of the PHP commands that will decode these seemed to work.

If anybody has any ideas, I’m keen to hear them.

1. well, okay, it doesn’t support HD videos [↩]

My daughter asked me last night if there’s a way to record quality video from a Nintendo DS.

After some digging I found that the only way to connect a DS to a video camera properly involves taking the DS apart, soldering and a general high-knowledge of electronics. My hope was that there some sort of GBA cart that would plug in and provide the facility.

However, I did come across the following video on YouTube which is a simple but genius alternative…

This would cover the picture – quality sound that doesn’t pick up your button clicking and nose sniffing can be achieved simply by connecting your DS headphone socket to your PC – you will need to record the video and sound at the same time but from different sources.

Forget people playing the theme tune to Super Mario Bros. on their cheeks, this is the kind of geeky thing that YouTube was made for…

Or even better (and god, how good is this?)…