Being a semi-professional Apple-hater, I’ve not had much use for Twitter’s new YTMND style videomaker toy, Vine. However, never let it be said I don’t like to fiddle with new stuff, so we had a go at one, just to say we did it, and so we could then forget all about it. The interface is very nice (leaving all discussion of the point of it aside), and it was easy to produce something speedy around a recent campaign graphic by a very clever colleague about the Working Time Directive.
However, it annoyed me a bit that it was so disposable – it goes out on Twitter and Facebook and that’s pretty much it. Hopefully the web services for Vine will come onstream at some point (and the Android app for the rest of us…), but in the meantime, here’s a slightly roundabout way to embed your Vine on your WordPress.org blog.
First off, you need to make sure you add it to Twitter. This is the last option Vine gives you when creating it, and if you skip it, you won’t get seen. The Vine itself isn’t actually shown in the timeline unless you click the “view media” link to expand it, but then you get to see it in all its 6 second glory.
Now, Twitter last year introduced the option to embed tweets into a web page. You’ll find it under the “more” link, bottom right of each tweet in the timeline. And this is how you’ll get to embed the Vine elsewhere on the web. Click it, and then “embed tweet” and you’ll get a snippet of code to copy. Make sure you check the “include media” box before copying.
Then off to WordPress, where you switch to Text view in a post, click “code”, paste the snippet and click “code” again to close it. Don’t switch back to Visual editing view (it might be a good idea to write the rest of the post before you do this), or it could screw up the code.
And here’s the result:
5 work rights you might well miss if David Cameron revokes the EU Working Time Directive http://www.stopemp... vine.co/v/bJjLPgUlv1d
— Stronger Unions (@strongerunions) January 29, 2013
True, you’re not directly embedding the Vine, and it’s including all the rest of the tweet stuff and formatting around it, but hey, that should be enough to prove you actually did make one, and can now go off an fiddle with something else…