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Have been having trouble adding YouTube videos into my posts for some time now. Thought it had to do with the fact that I wasn’t a subscriber, and YouTube was “cracking down.” No matter that I continued to do what I’d done before, following WordPress instructions. Something changed it seemed, and no one told me.

Thinking it might make a difference if I was a subscriber, I spent a couple of days recently trying to become one with YouTube. It was like trying to break into Fort Knox! Because I’d started on Google’s blogger.com, I already had an account. But I couldn’t remember my password. It’s been over a year since I went there. I guess YouTube is Google’s, so since the “big G” didn’t let me in, the “big Y” said “Sorry…no trespassers allowed.”

Determined to work at the obnoxious task before me, I kept jumping through the hoops. I even left my laptop, and went into the basement family room, which I dislike because it’s so dark, to see if using the computer where I’d signed up for Google made a difference. In fact, that was one of their prompts. No go. No amount of jumping through the same hoops down there made a difference. So I returned to my laptop, and jumped through one final hoop…and presto! I got lifetime membership into YouTube via Google. Don’t ask me how I did it. I couldn’t repeat it if I tried. And truth be told, I wouldn’t try it again if YouTube offered me a singing contract.

Thinking I now had the problem of inserting videos into my posts solved, I confidently tried to do just that. You guessed it! I still couldn’t get those little movie boxes to cooperate. They just didn’t want to come over to my blog, no matter how I tried to entice them. They didn’t care how well I wrote, at least to my way of thinking, nor did they care about all the great photographs keeping them company. Those YouTube videos just wouldn’t budge…so help me.

Funny how the old saying comes to mind, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” I think, perhaps, that it’s not so much the inability to learn new tricks, it’s probably that one needs to empty one’s mind of how the tricks were done in the past. You know “Out with the old; in with the new.” So intent was I on trying to add YouTube videos the old way, I wasn’t really reading their current directions about the new shortcut. I thought I was, but obviously I wasn’t. My brain assumed that the words in front of my eyes, said what they’d said the last time I read them. 

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Guess who got me to read what was in front of my eyes? My roommate…better known as my hubby. It may be that WordPress has become second nature to me, that I think I know everything about it. I know I’m kidding myself, but I like to live the fantasy. So when I ran into this technical “brick wall,” I asked my husband to tinker with the problem. Mind you, he doesn’t know WordPress from a bench press. But clear thinking has always been his forte.

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After taking him to a YouTube video of Michael Jackson’s career altering moment when he moonwalked for the first time in public, at the Motown 25th Anniversary celebration on TV, my husband figured out, after some hemming and hawing, that rather than copying the “share” URL for the video, he copied and pasted the URL at the top of the screen. The reason being, he said, and which I confirmed, was that the “share” URL spelled “youtu.be,” instead of the usual “youtube.” That period between the u and the b made all the difference in the world. Lightbulb moment!!!

My husband thinks the “share” URL might bring too much excess verbage with it that WordPress would prefer not to have clogging up its system. Makes sense to me. But as I explained to my daughter, I can mimic what’s being said. I can follow instructions…to some degree. Obviously not always. But I don’t necessarily understand the why-fors, where-fors, and what-fors. Or else I’m too impatient to get started, to get on with it, to check it off my “to-do” list. Thank goodness I’m not the breadwinner in my house.

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…we might be subsisting on bread and water…not a bad thing since we’re always fighting the battle of the middle-age belly…hugmamma.