I've noticed a lot of people use YouTube videos in their blogs, but when you use too many, especially in one blog entry, it can significantly slow the loading time for your blog or a specific entry. 

As with web sites, people here at Active Rain seem to be in a hurry when it comes to reading blogs and commenting. Some comment on the title of the blog entry, which can be really strange if the title has very little to do with the content of the blog entry, which is a common marketing tactic.

If your blog or any specific entry doesn't load fast enough, possible readers are off to someone else's blog and you lose their comment points.

Here's some help to speed things up when you use YouTube videos.

First, it's always fun to embed YouTube videos because that makes your own blog look much more hip and cool. It's embedding that really slows things down, though, because your Active Rain blog is constantly checking in with YouTube via that embed command. That's how that cool graphic shows up in your blog. So this tip is dedicated to you embedders out there.

YouTube, as with almost everyone in life, believes that bigger is better. Generally, that's true. So what YouTube has done with their HTML code is make it so that it shows up as large as possible on the great supermajority of the screens out there, regardless of what software or ISP they are using.

So when you go to embed a YouTube video, here is what the HTML code looks like:

That will give you a monster graphic that takes up a good deal of your screen. However, you don't have to do what YouTube wants you to do. You can decrease that graphic by 25%, 50%, 75%, or more.

In the above HTML code, you'll see object width="425" height="344". Instead of using those numbers, change them to something smaller.

For example, if you want the graphic to be

• 75% of its original size, use object width="319" height="258"
• 50% of its original size, use object width="213" height="172"
• 25% of its original size, use object width="107" height="86"

You'll notice very little, if any, deterioration in the quality of the video itself, and certainly no deterioration in the audio.

To see one of my blog entries that has about 20 YouTube videos, and loaded very slowly before I took action, click here.

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