Herself's Webtools

I’ve been meaning to cover this for weeks and kept getting detoured. You can add You Tube videos to your Blogger posts, WordPress posts, or just regular webpages and it is totally painless.

First sign up for a free You Tube account.
Add the video you wish to post to your favorites.
Go to My Account -> My Custom Players -> Create Custom Player
Answer the questions about how you want your personal You Tube Player to appear
Add the video
Copy and paste the code right into your post.

* Did you know you can take video on your mobile phone and send it straight to You Tube? How cool is that? I’ll have to go take some videos now.

See also: Blogging Video from your cell phone

Log onto your Google account and go to GMail.
In the upper left corner is a Calendar link – click it

In the left sidebar is a small link at the bottom ‘Manage calendars’ – click it
Up will come a list of the calendars you’ve created
Click on the link for the calendar you wish to add to your sidebar

Near the bottom you will see a section ‘Calendar Adress:’ and ‘xml’ ‘ical’ ‘html’
Click on the HTML button.

A pop up window will appear and you have two choices. The first is a direct link to your calendar
The second is a ‘configuration tool’ – Click that one

A page will appear with all sorts of details you can select – calendar format, size, &c.
Set things up how you like and click the ‘Update URL’ button.

Code will appear in a box ’2. Add the calendar HTML to your page’
Highlight and select all the text in that box and paste it into notepad or some other
text tool you like to use.

In Blogger go to Template->Add Page Element->HTML/JavaScript – ‘Add to Blog’
and paste your text into the box and save

In WordPress, go to Presentation->Themes->Theme Editor and paste it into your sidebar in an
appropriate spot.

Or you can just add it to any HTML page by pasting the text where you want the calendar to be.

You can see an example of this at Herself’s Houston Garden

These are useful for websites and blogs about local hobbies where there are events that will interest your readers. Or for blogs about clubs and organizations such as blogs for local photography clubs. Google calendars are nice since people interested in specific events can then just import them to their own Google calendar.

I found I needed to widen the sidebars in the blogs I put calendars into to about 340px. But I’ve been widening websites to 1000px any how since only about 10% of internet users are still using 800×600 displays.