Ardell DellaLoggia (one of my favorite people) posted this comment on my Friday Classics blog yesterday  "All I want for Christmas is...for CJ to give me the "Embedding YouTube into your Active Rain Post"...the "For Dummies" version. "

I know several Active Rain members have already covered this topic, but let me see if I can do some screen shots, and parse it down to "entry level" stuff.

This post will cover working with videos that are already on YouTube.  If anyone needs help getting their own personal video uploaded to YouTube, we can tackle that one a little later.

OK.  First go to http://www.youtube.com , and in the YouTube search box, type in a performer name, song title, or topic of interest:

Click Search, and YouTube will serve up a listing of all videos tagged with those search terms.  Choose one, and click on the video's title:

On the home page for the video you selected, look over in the right column.  Notice the "Embed" code?  Click right inside that dialogue box and the entire embed text will be selected.  Click Edit -> Copy.  Now that text is in your "clipboard",  and will stay there until you turn your computer off, or overwrite it by copying something else.

You can also paste the code into a text or word processing file for safe keeping.  Windows Notepad is handy for that sort of thing.

Now write your blog post in Active Rain, same as you always do.  At the end of the blog post, hit Enter a few times to insert some empty space.  (It's easier to do it now in the WYSIWYG editor than to add the space later in the HTML view).

In the Visibility section, click the drop down arrow and choose Draft.

Click Post Blog Entry.

As soon as Active Rain processes and redisplays the post, click Edit:

Click on the HTML tab:

Click Edit -> Paste to paste the embed code from Windows clipboard into the blog post.  Note I had to manually add some <p></p> tags to create some space.

I also tend to like my videos centered, so I typed in a <div align="center"> tag before the embed code, and and </div> tag at the end of the embed code.

Now click Post Blog Entry again:

Check to be sure everything looks the way you want it, then click Edit again, and change Visibility to Public or Members Only, and click Post Blog Entry one more time.