Cracking the embedded link mystery

Thanks to all of you who are providing feedback from my last blog as I try to figure out how to make the videos work.

My brother Steven wrote to suggest that I also post simple links to the videos in addition to the embedded version, since the embedded videos aren’t making it through. I wrote back explaining that was exactly what I’ve been trying to do, but wordpress (my blog software) embeds them automatically. That’s why I posted each in two different ways – I was trying to post the link without it being imbedded.

As I was explaining to Steven that was what I’ve been trying to do but failing, I thought of another way to try. So let’s do another test!

We’re going to experiment with a link to a video of Steven playing my handpan at Christmas time. I was very impressed with his musical ability. He had never even seen a handpan before in his life and just sat down and started playing it.

First I upload the video to youtube and copy the “shareable link”.

Then I paste that “shareable link” into my blog post.

Here’s what happens when I paste in the youtube link using a normal paste function: It embeds it automatically.

Do any of you see a video or a link to a video above this sentence? I think you’re getting exactly nothing, although I see the video.

Here’s a screenshot of what I’m seeing on my end:

Somehow I need to paste that link into my blog without wordpress automatically embedding the video. How do I make it stay just a link?

Steven gave me an idea by suggesting that I include a clickable link above or below the embedded video. And I have definitely tried, but I couldn’t figure out how. Every time I tried to paste a clickable link of a video into my blog, it would automatically change from a link to an embedded video. Non-video links work just fine – they stay as links – when I paste them into my blog. It’s just the video links that are automatically being converted to an embedded video when I paste them.

But then I remembered a link function I use to link to other parts of my blog. It looks like this:

And it works like this – I put in my keyword and it brings up relevant links from my blog.

I usually use that link function as a search engine to search for the url of the post I want to link to. But maybe if I pasted the video link into that link box, rather than into a regular paragraph block, it would link to the video instead of embed the video?

It was a “oh duh” lightbulb moment for me. I didn’t realize the link function worked for links outside my blog (such as youtube), because the search results are always limited to my blog posts, not the whole internet. Can you imagine what it would return if it were searching the whole internet using the keyword, “video”? LOL.

Because the keyword results are limited to my own blog, it didn’t occur to me that I could put outside internet links in there, like a youtube link. I thought that function was just an internal function, limited to within the blog.

But what happens if I paste the youtube video link into the box where I usually put a search term?

It looks like it’s going to work! Here’s the test – this link should take you away from this blog post and to the video on youtube. It’s not embedded in my blog anymore, and it should be a working link. Click here: https://youtu.be/a3F5aRTOt8g

Did it work? I’m hoping so. Meanwhile I’m curious if this link works too, https://youtu.be/a3F5aRTOt8g – or maybe not. I think that didn’t render as a link. Which is fine. I’m pretty sure the one in the previous paragraph is going to work. We’ll find out in a moment!

I appreciate all the feedback – thanks for being my blog testers!!!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com