Videos, the More Tag, Permalinks, and Shortlinks

Adding a YouTube Video (Part 1): To add a YouTube video, all we need to do is copy the URL from the address bar at the top of the browser. YouTube is by far the most popular video site, but WordPress.com also allows us to embed videos from other sites, such as Flickr, Vimeo, and Viddler. Besides adding images, one of the most effective ways to liven up our blog is to add videos. The free version of WordPress.com does not allow direct uploading of our own videos.

Adding a YouTube Video (Part 2): Let’s publish this post and see how it looks now on our live site. We can now paste the URL directly into our post, where we want the video to appear. WordPress will automatically convert this URL into a video player window for us.

Our New Post: The width and height of the video player can be adjusted, and several other features can be customized. If you would like to learn how, ask your instructor for additional resources. The post looks great and WordPress converted the URL into a playable video window, just like we wanted. For now, we are going to move on to a new concept: the More tag.

Introducing the More Tag: There is nothing technically wrong with this, but notice how the post takes up the entire page, and there’s no room left on the screen for other posts, unless we scroll down a lot. Let’s say we just published a new post. This is what the home page of our blog now looks like. By using the More tag, we can create a “teaser” to entice the reader to continue reading.

How to Insert the More Tag: A visible demarcation will be placed in our edit screen to show where the More break is located. This can be clicked and dragged to another place on the page, or we can delete it and insert a new one. To use the More tag, place the cursor in the appropriate location on the page and then click the “Insert More Tag” icon in the main toolbar.

The More Tag on Our Site: Also, now that we have shortened the screen space used by our new post, the previous post is much more prominent. Now when we go to our home page, we can see the “teaser” effect we created. The opening lines promise a list of movies, but the reader has to click the link to see the list. One additional benefit from using the More tag is that we can get a more accurate idea of how many people are reading our posts. This will be covered later, when we check our blog’s statistics. We are not stuck with the “Continue reading” wording. Next, we will see how to customize the wording for our More tags.

Viewing the HTML of a Post: Let’s click over to the HTML tab and view the actual code. Up to now, we have been working exclusively in the Visual Editor, which hides the HTML code from us and shows our content as formatted. Notice that we can now view the HTML formatting codes, such as italics ( ) and bold ( ). We can add our own HTML code in this screen, if we need that level of control over how our page looks. Here is the code that WordPress uses to create the More link. If we want to change the default “Continue reading” to something else, we edit it like this:

The More Tag with Custom Text: After saving the change and updating the page, we can go back to our live site and confirm that it worked as expected. Let’s move on to discuss two new topics: Permalinks and Shortlinks.

What is a Permalink? This full URL is the post’s Permalink. When readers bookmark our page or send the page link to a friend, it is this URL that will be used. On our live site, each of our posts has a unique (to the entire internet) URL, which is visible in the address window. The Permalink is automatically created by WordPress when we first save a new post. But what if we want to change it later? The format of the permalink is:.wordpress.com/ / / / Only the portion can be modified.

Modifying a Permalink: Another good reason to edit the Permalink is when our title is long, as in the case of this post, resulting in a long and unwieldy URL. WordPress creates the Permalink from the first post title we enter. If we later change that title, we would need to modify the Permalink ourselves. To edit the Permalink, we click on the Edit button and manually edit the text field that shows. Click the OK button when you are finished editing the Permalink, but remember that the change will not be applied until we click the Update button.

Confirming the new Permalink: Viewing the live post again, we can see our change. The new URL is much more reasonable. We needn’t worry about any readers who previously bookmarked or ed the original link to friends. WordPress will automatically redirect them to the new URL. As blog owners, though, we are not required to use these long URLs. If we wish to post a link to our site somewhere else on the web, or just send a link to a friend, we can use a Shortlink.

Using the Shortlink Feature: To access the Shortlink for a particular post, just click on the Get Shortlink button. We can now use this shorter URL when posting to social media sites or sending a link via . The URL will automatically redirect to this specific post on our site.