How to embed any video into your free wordpress.com hosted site

Thanks to the sexiest woman in the world for this tip:

Long time readers might have noticed that, in the last day or so, I’ve been embedding videos from a lot of sites which previously I had to simply link to, rather than present in-blog. YouTube and Google videos are easier to include than clips from sites like LiveLeak or MetaCafe, for example, because wordpress.com hosted sites include non-configureable plug-ins which allow authors to use special syntax to automatically embed clips from these sites, into the blog compose window.

But this doesn’t mean you can’t embed clips from other video sharing communities. VodPod, simply put, enables you to paste the embed code, which most video sharing sites provide, into a format that wordpress.com free hosted blogs won’t strip out, because of restrictions on the kinds of embedded widgets which non-VIP wordpress blogs are allowed to include.

• Open a VodPod.com account.
• Open the site with the video clip you want to embed on your wordpress.com blog, look for the embed code and copy it to the clipboard (Command + C)
• Click the ‘Paste Embed Code’ tab on your main account page in VodPod


VodPod will strip out any code that WordPress.com hosted blogs don't allow

• Paste the embed code into the box and click ‘Preview’
• You should then see a preview window with a ‘Post to Blog’ tab at the top


Any video sharing site which includes embed code, can now be posted to your wordpress.com free hosted blog

• After configuring VodPod to allow it to post to your blog, you can fill out the text to include as a title and a message
• Click ‘Publish’ and after posting the article to your wordpress.com blog, VodPod displays a link to your new blog entry and includes the video in your VodPod.com collection, which you can share as a stream using the side-bar widget, included with all wordpress.com free hosted blogs

VodPod can convert the embed code from just about any of the major clip sharing sites into wordpress.com friendly syntax.

What I do find a little strange, considering how much time wordpress.com’s own forums spend explaining to people why certain plug-ins are only available to self-hosted wordpress.org bloggers and not wordpress.com hosted blogs (especially considering there is an already provided wordpress.com side-bar widget for VodPod) is that it isn’t more clearly explained in the wordpress.com documentation, on embedding videos, that this service is so easy to use and such a great addition to the wordpress.com blogging platform.

The existing help documentation, at least not in a way I’ve been able to figure out, doesn’t make this clear – so thanks again to the loverly Lucy, for telling me about this and enabling me to include so much more multimedia on here, from now on.