Reducing the size of Youtube clips on blogs

Has anyone ever embedded a Youtube clip onto a blog entry, only to realise that it ends up in widescreen – and off the right edge of the blog page – making the “Full screen” playing option impossible to choose?

I hit upon this snag recently. Some Youtube clips are now in HD and widescreen, so they don’t all defer to the smallest screen automatically, and sometimes even the 560×340 frame will be too wide for a blog.

Through trial and error, I’ve worked out a solution. At the Youtube site, click on the little asterisk-looking “cog”/”wheel” icon on the right of the “Embed” text box. That will permit you to “Customize” the embedding code. Tick those of the boxes you require (but definitely not the “Include related videos” option, as that can often lead you to porn and other unsavoury videos related by coincidence of a secondory meaning for your original keywords).

Next, you can select a colour combination for your frame from nine different options (match your blog theme, or something appropriate to the clip itself), and then, under that, choose “480×295” as your desired size from the four frame sizes offered. Now return to the “Embed” box, cut and save your revised HTML code and drop the saved text into your blog entry.

Done!