Posting Animoto “Cool Slides Shows Videos” in WordPress

Once you have made your video in Animoto, you might want to post it in your blog. If you have WordPress and already wrote the post, and want to include it, the process is not that smooth as it should. Generally I write and then look for the media to include, or included until the post is finish. Animoto has the option of creating a post, that goes to your WordPress drafts, with the “embedded widget” and then you could add the content. However if you include more than one video, your not going to do more than one post? Also I want more control and freedom, copy paste freedom.

Note the reader: It might seen of too complicated for some users and they are better of posting the video from Animoto and then write the blog, true. However the target audience is for people that want to post more than on video or/and want more control.

Here is how you do it:

Go to your Animoto account and play your video.

Then click on the Post/Embed online button, the video will stop.

You will be presented with a variety of social media places where to post the video, choose the Embeded instead. There you will be presented with to options: MySpace and Other Sites. Click on Other sites.

Copy the code and put it on notepad or some text editor.

Here is a sample code that I copy from my video:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/46928cc51133af17/499300880f97edc6/46928cc565ffaf02/94f136e9/-cpid/791d0466298564d9/autostart/false/widget.js”></script>

Note the two alphanumeric strings above: one in red and the other in blue. You copy the code bellow and assign to the wid the red string and to the pid the blue string. Genearrly the red one will be the same for all your videos in Animoto and the blue one will change every time you generate the code in the site, even for the same video.

['clearspring_widget title="Animoto.com" wid=" " pid=" " width="432" height="260" domain="widgets.clearspring.com"]

(Note the apostrophe betwen the braket and clearspring, that should be removed when posting, is so the wordpress will not try to process it as a widget)

At the end you will end up with the following:

['clearspring_widget title="My Animodo Post Hack" wid="46928cc51133af17" pid="499300880f97edc6" width="300" height="200" domain="widgets.clearspring.com"]

Which will look like this:

[clearspring_widget title="My Animodo Post Hack" wid="46928cc51133af17" pid="499300880f97edc6" width="300" height="200" domain="widgets.clearspring.com"]

You can also change the title, width and height of the widget. The hight and width alters the widget, not the content so you will end up like a “baddly cut off” video, as shown above.

Once you finish, you are ready to put it in your post in HTML or source mode, depending on the editor. You can use the preview button to check how it looks and if you need to tweak the size to goes better with your blog and blogging style.

Conclusion

Social media is about sharing, if you suck at it even with a great product/service, it will not pick up as it should. Animoto uses Clearspring for the posting and embedding of the content produced on the site. Its ok to outsource that, generally those one fit all solution that promise the heavens, don’t do a good job. Usability test will be nice to find where clearspring product fails. At least the Facebook one does a good job if I’m already logged, unfortunately I can’t put it in “my videos”, its posted like YouTube videos.