Do you like listening to music while you read? I do. And sometimes when I write a blog post, I find there’s a song that’s particularly relevant to what I want to say, so I want to make it easy for my readers to listen to that song while they read along. For example see my articles on Into The Wild and Path Of Love on my other blogs.
The way I do this is by embedding a YouTube video with the soundtrack I want on my blog with the video window clipped off by limiting its height to the height of the YouTube play control bar.
To embed the YouTube audio track on your blog, you need the WordPress Video Plugin. WordPress’s built-in embed feature can’t do this, because oEmbed will scale the video window when you attempt to reduce it’s size; when what you really want to do is clip it right off.
Then, find a video of the music that you want to embed by searching YouTube. Once you’ve found the music you like, check it’s YouTube id. This is the jumble of characters in the address bar after ?v=. So for the video with the address:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGzLyhfwmTM
The YouTube id is:
cGzLyhfwmTM
The trick is to embed the YouTube video into your post with such a small height that only the playback toolbar at the bottom shows. You don’t want to distract your readers with the video; you just want the music track. To do this, put this in your post:
[youtube id 450 25]
I recommend you centre this, and add some italic text above it saying something like:
Play along with this background music as your read:
And voilla! You’ve given your visitors a complete multi-media experience.
2 Comments
Jarrod Frenzel · January 6, 2012 at 12:04 am
Many people like listening to music while reading or writing. Having your readers listening to some music as they read your posts can be interesting but just if you know the type of music that most of them like. If you put on any type of music then some readers may be annoyed.
Graham · January 6, 2012 at 12:28 pm
Yes, I try to match the music to the emotion I feel while writing the post in order to get a greater connection with the reader.