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Misty just loaded and configured the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin from Alex King, so you can now browse our site from your internet enabled p.d.a. or mobile phone. On Misty’s Dell Axim the photos and text render very nicely, and on our Samsung x427m phones the text is optimized for easy reading. While the visual experience is still best on a laptop or desktop, for quick viewing on a mobile device things work just fine. Let us know if there’s any problem on any of your mobile browsers.

But Carsten Schmidt asks, “Mobile 2.0? Where was mobile 1.0?” Yep, there are still a lot of things to work out, and that’s where the Fun comes in!

Last week we installed the Share This plugin for WordPress and loved it, but had a few minor details to work out. We noticed that sometimes if we had an embedded YouTube video it would cover up the Share This box, making the Share This plugin useless on that particular post. Although on other YouTube embedded videos Share This popped up in front of them just like it was meant to.

Bill wanted me to tell the story of how I tracked the problem down. I argued that people didn’t care how I tracked it down, they would just want the answer. If you are one of those people that just want the answer skip to the last paragraph, if you want the story then read on.

First, I tested how Share This displayed with different YouTube videos and could find no pattern to how it displayed. All of our videos were the exact same width and height and most of our titles on posts were one line. So, then I thought the problem must be some difference in the HTML code of the post. I went and looked at the posts and found that in the YouTube videos that did not block ShareThis there was some extra embed code from YouTube. I went to YouTube’s website and found the video that was not working and recopied the embed code into my post. Once I did that all worked fine.

When a video is first uploaded to YouTube you get some code to embed the video, this is before YouTube finishes processing the video. After YouTube processes the video the embed video code is changed slightly. You can see the differences in the picture below. The text in red is the information added to the embed code after the video processes.





The solution is to not copy the initial embed code that YouTube gives you before processing the video. Simply wait until the YouTube video finishes processing and then grab the embed code off of your video’s page on YouTube. If you do this then Share This and YouTube play very nicely together. So, go ahead, Share This !