Not sure if I missed it on the first run through the installed plug-ins, or if the admin team is very active with add-ons for users, but after spending some time today trying to get a Youtube video to show in a Page I noticed the “wordTube” plugin.

I activated it, found a wordTube link in the Media area of the dashboard, and added a Youtube video. Cool.

After some finagling I sorted out the method for getting the video to load in the page.

Here’s “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” by Michael Wesch, as a video embedded in a blog entry:

[media=1]

Nice. Easy. Unattractive!

Positioning and resizing a wordtube video in a post

Dumping a video on the page is one thing. Getting it to look good by positioning and resizing is something else.

I was able to resize the wordtube media with a little code, and to center the media by wrapping it in a div and affixing an inline style of center to it. No sweat, though it would be nice for students if this could be handled through buttons.

Here’s a cheesy caption one might put beneath the video

If you know your way around an html element or two, and a little about css, the following will help you out. If you don’t know about html/css, you probably want to just wait for some new plugin or enhancement to wordtube.

• Code I used to adjust media size: media=# width=xxx height=xxx
• Code I used to center the media: div style=”text=align:center

Loading the video into a “portfolio” page

Here it is loaded onto a page nested within the Courses area of the sandbox eportfolio. (Scroll to the bottom of that page for the link(s).

I tried to adjust the default size of the video in the page by modifying preferences in wordTube. While I thought I had made the mods, I’m not seeing a resized video. I suspect this is because I’m grabbing a smaller version of the Youtube video. (More tweaking will provide answers.)