I recently noticed a comment from an OmniNerd user that posting media into an article wan’t easy. This quick How-To will address that issue with a demonstration of embedding a picture and a video.

How To Post Pictures

The first thing you need to do, is create a new article using the typical routine. Click on Submit New at the top and choose the Article type. The site will prompt you for the usual preliminaries, a title and some tags, after which you must click Save Draft and Begin Auto-Saving.

To put a picture into your article, start by clicking Edit / Upload Images for this Article. You’ll be brought to a screen like the one below. From here, you simply pick a JPG, GIF or PNG file from your computer and click Upload Image.

After a brief pause while the browser transfers the file to the server, you’ll see the page change to show your picture(s). The more pictures you upload, the more will be visible here.

You could just use it “as is”, but clicking on View/Edit will give you many more options. You can resize the overall image that is seen if the picture is looked at specifically or just resize the thumbnail that is displayed in-line with the article. Nobody ever really seems to caption or tag their pictures, but you can do this here as well. The next two options allow for the image to appear either left, center or right aligned with text flowing around it. If these options seem weird, please blame CSS.

When you’re done editing the metadata to your image, click Back to your draft's image list at the top. You’ll return to the familiar list of images that you’ve uploaded. To embed the image, simply copy the text under the What to Paste in Your Article heading.

Finally, in the text area where you normally type your content, just paste in the previous text as shown below.

That’s it – there’s nothing else to embedding media images into your articles! In this example, you should see a big, planet Earth centered below this text.

How To Post Videos

Posting video is actually pretty easy … the challenge is finding the right part of the embed code. OmniNerd simply makes use of a browser’s flash player against the remote resource using an <embed> tag. It’ll play anything that’s flash encoded, you just have to find the link. For this example, we’ll embed a YouTube video.

Obviously, your first step is to find something from YouTube. Once you found your target, look for the Share button below the video.

The metadata below the video will change to a shortened URL designed for FaceBook, Twitter and other short attention span social media sites. That’s not what you want.

Click on the Embed button. You’ll find the metadata has changed again, presenting you with raw HTML making use of iframes. OmniNerd doesn’t support embedded iframes.

Click the checkbox that reads Use old embed code [?]. This will change the HTML in the box to a lower tech set of HTML tags using objects and embeds. You’ll have to copy the whole thing … that’s the only option YouTube gives you.

Paste the whole thing into your OmniNerd article. You only need one piece of this and that’s the URL associated with the embed src tag.

You can now get rid of all the HTML that YouTube provided you. Keep the URL that you discovered and use the following simple syntax.

That’s all there is to embedding video within an OmniNerd article. It seemed involved, but that’s only because YouTube hides all the old embedded tags. If you know the direct link to any flash video, you can just use the OmniNerd syntax directly without jumping through any hoops.