October 06, 2010

Adding videos and other media to a web page

How do you embed a video in your pages, news stories, events, etc.?

How do you embed a video in your LiveWhale pages, news stories, events, etc.? Follow these steps.


1. You’ll be putting the file on a video server like YouTube or Vimeo. So you’ll probably need to create an account there. Important: use your department/office’s general email account (like english@ or safety@) rather than a personal one; that way if (gasp) you ever were to leave, your co-workers can still access the videos, right?

2. These services have very straightforward links like “Click here to add a new video” that are fairly easy to understand. Upload your video there.

3. Once your video is uploaded, the service (YouTube or Vimeo) will give you ways to link to the video and to embed it. The latter is what we are after here. We are looking for the embed code. It will start with “<object>” and end with “</object>” and have a whole lot of techy gibberish in between. Copy that and return to your own website, back at Lewis & Clark.

4. Go to the page, news story, event, etc. where you want to embed the video. Begin to edit as you would normally, but take the extra step of clicking the HTML button on the right side of the editing tool bar.

5. This pops up a little box with the HTML code for what you’re working on. Find where you want the video (often at the very end), and paste in the embed code from #3 above.

6. Hit “update” to close the box. You are returned to the regular editing mode. Note that you will NOT YET see the video displayed, as we have not saved anything.

7. Hit “save and publish,” and you are done. Your video is now live for the world to see.