WordPress YouTube ad surprise

The video-player link at the bottom is an ad, not part of my article.

WordPress.com has made it very easy to post YouTube videos, a feature I’ve used a lot. (See the Video and WP Tips menu items above.)

However, I’ve just discovered that WordPress.com, is also embedding YouTube video ads in my pages. I knew that new visitors sometimes would see clearly marked text ads at the end of blog posts, but I don’t like the fact that these video ads are indistinguishable from the content of the page.

Since they are not shown to logged-in users, I never see them. But today I visited my Newspaper Heroes on the Air (jheroes.com) blog using an old laptop, and discovered an unrelated YouTube video at the bottom of the page — looking just like the embedded videos I sometimes use as part of blog items.

I can make all of the ads go away by paying WordPress.com an annual fee, and that’s probably what I’ll do — as soon as I balance my budget for the year. I’ve read the original terms of service for using WordPress, but only remembered a reference to “We very occassionally show Adsense (contextual text ads) on post and tag pages.” Unlike text ads I had seen, the video (or graphics) not only look like part of my “content,” they also slowed down the loading of pages on that old laptop.

If you know of a WordPress page or forum discussing this YouTube ad policy — Is it new? — please add a comment below.

Blogpost timewarp?

This is a test. For more interesting content go over to jheroes.com

I posted an item there this morning using my MacBook, then came back a few hours later to make a small correction using my Droid phone’s WordPress app.

The process went smoothly, but when I checked with a browser today’s item was gone!

Back on the regular WordPress editor, I discovered the message was not gone, just “scheduled” to be posted tomorrow. Somehow updating with the Droid app had changed the publication date to June 6 even though it had already appeared as http://jheroes.com/2011/06/05/journalists-cutting-deals-keeping-secrets/

Notice that the date is part of the file path.

So I’m using the same Droid software to post this item; let’s see if it’s gone today or here tomorrow.

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Okay — it’s here when and where it should be. Nothing like a nice Sunday mystery. But I did notice a “Publish” button with a date-setting function in the Droid app this time; maybe a slip of the thumb changed the date on that other post.

In any case, it’s a neat feature to have in WordPress — especially for a podcast. I guess I just hadn’t noticed it among the many features I’ve been telling students about in the standard WordPress “dashboard.” Now that I’ve looked for it, the word “Edit” is obviously sitting there in underlined blue type right next to the “Published on: June 5, 2011 @ 18:26″ in the “Publish” corner of the dashboard.

It’s now 6:41. As a test, I’m going to change that time to 18:45 and see what happens. With this time-scheduling feature, who knows… when school starts, I might be able to line up a few episodes in advance — assuming I ever avoid “new WordPress feature distractions” enough to get ahead on my writing.