I have to say I’ve been a bit HTML-phobic ever since I had to use it way back in college to build websites for my education classes . . . come to think of it, that is probably WHY I’m phobic.  Anyway, the whole web 2.0 revolution has opened up a whole new world for people like me — we don’t NEED to deal with HTML because it is done for us like magic!

Well, most of the time . . . lately I’ve had to go in and play with the code to get pbwiki to do what I want.  And now it turns out that we have to use the HTML tab in Edublogs to embed things like videos and such. (Before you get confused, the “Add media” icons in the Visual Editor are for things downloaded to your computer or at a URL — not for things with code.)

The good part about this is that it sounds like you can embed almost anything.  The bad news is that you have to toggle back and forth between the “Visual” tab in the Editor and the “HTML” tab in the Editor.

For details see The (wonderful) Edublogger’s post about this.  Quick and dirty:  If you want to add an Animoto video or a GooglePresentation or anything with code . . .

  • Write everything you want in your post using the Visual Editor first
  • When everything is done EXCEPT adding the code, click on the HTML tab
  • Find the place in the your post where you want to add the code
  • Copy the code from wherever it is and paste it into the HTML Editor
  • DO NOT CLICK BACK TO THE THE VISUAL EDITOR OR DO ANYTHING ELSE
  • Just click “Publish” and wait for it to be done publishing.  When you go to “Visit Site,” your video (or whatever) should be there looking pretty

I just tried it with some GooglePresentations (post) and Animoto Videos (post) and it worked well.  One thing to be aware of — the next time I went to write a post the Editor was still in the HTML tab, so you may have to make sure that you are in the Visual tab every time. (I’m not sure, but it did that even though I have the Visual Editor set as my default.)

So, don’t be HTML-phobic — it is easy!  After all, it is really only copying and pasting, and we do that all the time anyway.