Logo Design, Web Design, Charlotte NC: Varloo Design

I was trying to find a script that would add/blog YouTube videos automatically whenever I added them to a playlist. I couldn’t find such a thing. But what I did find is Smart YouTube. This plugin is a perfect WordPress plugin because you just post the URL, add a ‘v’ after the http, and it adds the embed code, and the thumbnail of the video. The settings for your videos sitewide can all be set from the plugin admin. So I can add hundreds of videos (which I do at MidKid Video), and control several settings that will apply to every YouTube clip on the site.

The settings that are most important to me are:

• disabling related videos at the end of the clip
• automatically adding the thumbnail from YouTube
• disabling annotations
• controlling the size of the player

This plugin is great. The only flaw is that when things don’t work on a video, it won’t work on all your videos. The most recent issue I’m having using the Smart YouTube plugin is that the YouTube video will play, but only has audio, no video. Again, this happens sitewide, so it’s a huge bummer. But the developer is a real pro, so I’m hoping we can get it solved shortly.

I always want to share great youtube videos with my much younger brother-in-law, but I always ran into the issue of trying to find clean youtube videos. So I started a site last year, then neglected it for almost a year, and now I’m committed to posting often. I lost focus of what it was trying to do, and what kind of video site it was trying to be. But now I think I’ve got, so check out MidKid Video.

MidKid Video - Clean youtube videos kids in the middle

I’m still not sure if the name is just right or not, but I’ve decided to forgo trying to name it perfectly and get a cool logo and everything else that I usually obsess about, in order to get it up and running quickly. And once it catches on, I might update those things, but for now, I’m just going to focus on posting great youtube videos that are clean. Let me know what you think.

Facebook is constantly rolling out new features and “updates,” but often those changes are unwanted. The way that the photo viewer worked before was just rock solid. It was dead simple and there was nothing to change. But…

Rolling Back Facebook Changes?

If only Facebook would release new designs and features with the option to use the old version. I know they did this with the new profile pages, it was sort of an ‘opt-in’ feature, with a date of complete switch. But we should still have the option to rollback changes, right? I mean, we are all spending tons of time on there, we should be able to keep it how we like it.

I know everyone always makes fun of the folks who hate the new Facebook design, but this time, I’m on the other side. I miss the old photo viewer. Do you?

We officially launched Qpicker.com, a cool tiny site that chooses 1 thing for you to watch from all of those in your Netflix Queue.

It seemed like we were always having the conversation “What should we watch on Netflix?” We have over a hundred titles in our queue and can never make a decision. When it’s friends, it’s even worse, nobody knows what they want to watch, and so nothing happens. Well problem solved, because Qpicker can take the blame for you (but it was in your instant queue, so not all of it).

Another cool feature is that we feature what someone else just picked right on the homepage, so you can even see some movies that aren’t in your queue, but that someone else thought was worth watching.

Once you choose a movie, you can click a button to watch it now, or choose a different movie.

So next time you’re not sure what to watch in your Netflix Instant Queue, turn to Qpicker.