Web Tools - YouTube
YouTube
(currently owned by Google)
provides free hosting of video.
- To upload videos, you need an account
- To upload videos longer than 15 minutes, you need a cell phone capable of receiving text messages
In addition, this documents a few items that are fairly hard to find in the help.
In several cases, one help page disagrees with the information in another page.
Creating an account
| Hiding Your Age
| Long Videos
| Watch page channel icon
| Linking to your channel
Creating an account
Each account is associated with one, and only one, email address.
In addition, you may have only one account per email address.
YouTube suggests
that business account should not be associated with either
- Your business email address
- Personal email address
If either of these is used, and you leave the company (or get a promotion),
then your replacement will not be able to access the account.
Instead, you should create an email address specifically for managing
the company's YouTube account.
Perhaps something like
youtube@mycompany.com
marketing@mycompany.com
|
By the way, this advice also applies to clubs and other organizations.
In your account's Profile Settings,
there is an option to change the associated email address.
Once you have an account, then you need a Channel Name.
This must be unique and, once selected, can not be changed.
There is an option (link) to test various names before you have to pick one.
Hiding Your Age
When creating an account, YouTube wants to know your age (entered as the date you were born).
I always just make something up. However, there are a couple of gotchas
- Whatever you enter can never be changed
- If you enter a date less than 13 years ago, then YouTube will permanently lock the account
and you won't be able to change it
(Hint: don't use the date your company was founded if it was not more than 13 years ago.)
YouTube says
- You can make age not visible on your YouTube account in Profile Settings.
- If you select a gender and wish to change it later, you can make it not visible or change it in your account Profile Settings.
Well .. neither of these options is available on the associated page.
Instead you can hide your age via
- Click your user name and select My Channel
- Click Edit
- Don't forget to click Apply
(This only took about half an hour to find once I saw the option
in the help file while reading about something else.
The "logical" button is Settings .. but you must click Edit instead.)
As for gender, on another help page
YouTube says
|
YouTube does not display your gender on your channel page
|
Like I said, their help is severely lacking.
Long Videos
By default, YouTube allows users to upload videos shorter than 15 minutes.
(Notice that only the length matters, not the number of bytes.)
If you want to upload longer videos, then you must verify the account
with a cellphone capable of receiving text messages.
Pretty simple .. except for a very big, undocumented, gotcha!
Any given cellphone can only be used to verify 2 (that's right, only two)
accounts.
Needless to say, I discovered this the hard way - my 2 allowed accounts were used for
a work account and a test account. Then when I wanted my own account ..
well, I said that this was an undocumented constraint.
Watch page channel icon
If you elect to become a brand channel partner
(which means that at least some of your videos will show ads),
then you are allowed to
provide an image that displays where your channel name normally displays.
Linking to your channel
If you want to link from your web page to YouTube, you can
use these icons.
The provided html code continues to read the icons from the YouTube site.
Personally, I prefer to save the image on my site .. if for no other reason than
to keep tracking crumbs off my site, but also so that a change on a site that I don't
control won't do bad things to my site's visitors.
The following is the code that YouTube provides - reformatted to make it more readable.
| <![CDATA[
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/[YourChannelName]?
feature=creators_cornier-%2F%2Fs.ytimg.com%2Fyt%2Fimg%2Fcreators_corner%2FYouTube%2Fyoutube_32x32.png">
<img src="//s.ytimg.com/yt/img/creators_corner/YouTube/youtube_32x32.png"
alt="Subscribe to me on YouTube"/></a>
<img src="//www.youtube-nocookie.com/gen_204?
feature=creators_cornier-//s.ytimg.com/yt/img/creators_corner/YouTube/youtube_32x32.png"
style="display: none"/>]]>
|
I have serious problems with this code.
- I don't understand why the feature property is used
- It gets the image from a site without using "http://" .. which causes problems with my local test system
- It has a hidden image - presumably to track pages
- The alt-message is ambiguous - will clicking the icon automatically subscribe to
the channel .. or not?
This is how I think the code should look.
| <![CDATA[
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/[YourChannelName]">
<img src="image/youtube_32x32.png"
alt="Please view my channel on YouTube"/></a>]]>
|
| Images
|
|---|
| 32x32
|
| 48x48
|
Author:
Robert Clemenzi