Video Woes

2007 Aug 15, 3:30I've been experimenting with adding video to my webpage. I tried to embed video in my livejournal blog posts previously however ran into some issues with that. When creating the LJ post I added an tag but when I submit that tags turned into an

 pointing to a page with my video. Only the first of these appears to work. The RSS item for the corresponding LJ entry has a tag instead of my video. This is even less
useful than the iframe because it uses some internal id to identify the embed rather than a URI or something I could actually use.<br />
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As a place to store videos and possibly as a means around the previous issue <a href="http://www.youtube.com/sequelguy">I tried youtube</a>. YouTube provides <a href="http://youtube.com/rssls">RSS
feeds for their users</a> which is great for me since my page is made from combining RSS and Atom feeds. I've incorporated it into my site already although I'm still in need of a better icon, I don't
have a comments link at the bottom, and I'd like the text to flow around the video. I was able to hide the automatically added portion of the RSS item I didn't like using CSS. On the topic of YouTube
not giving me a lot of control over the description, it doesn't seem to allow HTML in the description of a video. I don't particularly care about free form HTML if only I could get some links!<br />
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Well I didn't try very hard to get HTML into my YouTube video description so there maybe something I can do about that. Otherwise, I think the better solution is to post videos to YouTube only as
storage like I do with photos on Flickr and use LiveJournal to talk more about particular videos. To get around the LJ video issues, I'm going to try creating some new tags in my blog post that LJ
hopefully won't mess with and will hopefully make it cleanly into my RSS feed. At that point I can use XSL to turn the new tags into the appropriate embed/object tags for the video.