Linkless Lamentations

If you have ever put an embedded video, flash file or other sort of non-standard information¹ in your blog post; take heed.

There are many of us (legions, you might say) who consume your information through RSS feeds. And chances are, the information you are embedding isn't coming through your RSS feed or feeds. What makes matters worse is that you aren't providing a link to that content. So when you say something like "I'm going to shake hands like this from now on..." and embed the video to YouTube beneath that... we miss the joke.



The good news is that there exists a quick and easy fix for this. On the YouTube page where you got the embed code, there's another smaller snippet of code that is a simply hyperlink to the exact spot on YouTube where we can watch the video. Once you've embedded the video on the post, chose a relevant piece of text and make it a link to the YouTube (or whatever) page. In my instance above, you might select the "shake hands like this" text. While the embedded video won't come down to us, we now have an obvious link to the video. And now we get the joke.

I know what you are thinking: "Evo, you lazy bastard... If you simply click on the title of the post in your RSS reader, you'll be taken to my page where the information is contained for your viewing pleasure." True. Very true. However, that assumes I know that there is something I'm missing. My example above isn't indicative, but many posts don't have any text that leads me to believe that there is content I'm not seeing. So your post sound a little rushed or not complete... but I'm checking hundreds of feeds.

Do me a favor: the next time you embed a video or non-standard element in your post, please make a hyperlink to the content for me. That way, I'll get the joke every time.

¹ - Images and text are standard. Anything else? Non-standard.