WordPress
My Top 3 Posts in 2006 + Bonus Video
As a a father of a 6 week old baby I am fairly busy with little time to blog. However today I took the time to review my Blog statistics for 2006 (well I started this Blog in July 2006). The result is a bit surprising to me. I expected that the core topic I am writing about, Rich Internet Applications and the adoption in the enterprise software space and particularly SAP would be of most interest to my Blog readers. Turns out that the most read post on this topic ranks only number 3. It is my report on the SDN Day in Las Vegas and also benefited from the Scoble effect, since I met him for the first time at the show and he did a brief interview with me. Reminds me that I never saw a published version of that interview… well he has a lot of content and this probably fell through the grid 
Validating the long tail theory, number 2 is my posting featuring Trial Bike videos on YouTube. Bike Trial is certainly a sport not widely know around the world. Yet my post about it got significant views from Readers who were searching for keywords “Trial Bike Videos” on Google. Highly specialized content continues to rule the Internet. There is a sequel to this story. I sent a link of the posting to my friend Volker, who introduced my to Bike Trial back in 1988 and he just emailed me that for Christmas he got a new trial bike from Koxx. So he is ready for more action. He also sent me a link to this extreme trial bike video which clearly tops all my previous videos.
Coming to Number 1… Recently Shel Israel gave a number of tips on how to improve Blogs to make them more interesting. He states “It is better to be useful then boring”. While it seems obvious, it is easier said then done. My post on “How to embed YouTube videos into a WordPress blog” clearly hit a nerve with many people out there and based on the comments proved to be very useful. So maybe it is not a surprise after all that it received the most visits in 2006.
I am curious how Blog traffic will change in 2007 and what topics will be on this list in a year from now. Happy New Year!
Challenges with embedding YouTube video into WordPress Blog
Today I tried to integrate a YouTube video into my WordPress. It did not work out of the box. Initially the video would break the layout in Firefox and not show up in Internet Explorer. It turned out that the problem is the Rich Text Editor in WordPress. Even if you select the HTML editing mode and copy over the HTML provided by YouTube it fails.
To make it work I changed back to the older WordPress Editor…
1. Login to WordPress admin
2. Go to Options >> Writing
3. Uncheck both Users should use the visual rich editor by default &
WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically
4. Go to Users
5. Uncheck Use the visual rich editor when writing
6. Go to Write >> Write Post
7. Paste the ’embeddable player’ code for your YouTube video in the write box
8. In the code change the width of the player to “500” (depends on your template, but in my template the standard “600”setting ruined the layout in IE.
8. Publish blog
Now it works (see my previous blog entry).
