What is this, nursery school?
I’m a big fan of WordPress. It’s lightweight, super-flexible, and it has an awesome community that churns out plugins and themes to make setting up a website a cinch. This site itself is based on WordPress and I couldn’t be happier with it.
The WordPress people also let you have a blog as a subdomain of wordpress.com; e.g. you can register and post to mymomsfancypants.wordpress.com if you wanted. I’ve used these simple hosted blogs in the past and I still do. Like many hosted services, there are some restrictions, and by and large you can live with them. But I just ran into one that bugs me. A lot.
You see, the WordPress people are anal about security. Like, really anal about security. I can’t say I blame them because their servers are the ones storing your content end executing your code, but I bumped up against this tonight in a really frustrating way. You see, you can’t embed code in your website. Like, if you try to put the following in your post:
“<object width="400" height="225"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7970212&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" /><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7970212&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="400" height="225"></embed></object><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/7970212">Reel</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user1398023">Rafael Hernán Gamboa</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>”
then nothing will happen. In most civilized universes, the server will reach out and turn this into a video or something, but not in WordPress.com-land! Needless to say, this is so annoying that the WordPress people were bound to hear, shall we say, quite an earful. So they helpfully put in some hooks to let you use popular services, such as YouTube, so you can put things like “[Youtube="www.someYouTubeURL"]“.
This is fine if you want to put in a YouTube video, but what about Vimeo or iBBC or some other embeddable thing that WordPress hasn’t added in support for yet? Well, I’ll tell you what, You’re Screwed, with a capital Y and a capital S and make sure you don’t drop the soap.
I can understand the security motivations, but really, is this nursery school or something? You can’t embed video?! There are other hosted solutions that embed video, and I don’t see them collapsing under the weight of their pwnz0red servers! What a drag.
Don’t you know that 90% of the Internet is porn and insults? The odds are against any video you post being benign. Silly wabbit.