Most days, I embed a video clip on this site. I've been doing this since March of 2006. This was the first one.
I've posted something like four thousand of them in that time…all videos on other sites that I embedded here for you. In some cases, the site where the video was hosted took it down or the entire site went away. Either way, that link now goes to nothing. That's one reason why if you look back on this weblog, a spot that used to display a video sometimes now has a big blank area or one of these…
Another reason though is that in July of 2017, YouTube stopped supporting video embeds that involve the flash protocol. Most of my embedded videos have come from YouTube and for a long time, all of those used the flash protocol. Well more than a thousand videos on this site went blank when they stopped supporting flash. The code was still there but you henceforth saw (and may still see) a blank space unless I manually replace that spot with the above graphic.
There does not seem to be any simple software way to convert the old flash-driven video links to the newer, preferable iframe format. It's necessary to…
- Go in and find the video on YouTube. That is if it's still there…
- Get the code that will now allow that video to be embedded here via iframe…
- Slightly alter that code so it works with the special needs of this board…
- Go back and edit the old post to take out the flash link and put in the iframe link.
This takes time and I ain't got a lot of it lately. So I'm doing a little of it and will do more if/when I can. But I thought I oughta let you know that some old dead videos will reappear. In some cases, I'm embedding a newer video in an old post when the old video is no longer where it used to be. I just replaced one video clip in a 2009 post with a copy of the same clip that was posted on YouTube in 2016. Don't be confused if you notice this kind of thing.
I may not be able to do a lot of this but you should know that I'm doing any of it. If someone knows of a better way to do this than editing each friggin' dead video embed by hand, I'd love to hear it. I'm not going to fix any text links so if an old post invites you to click and read some article on another site and the article is no longer at that web address, too bad.