Alex Ferguson came up with a way to help us align videos with the text, floating them to the left or right of the post content area so the text will wrap around the video.

NOTE: This is not for the timid nor typical usage. This was an experiment and it works. To embed a YouTube (and most popular video services) video into your blog post, simply paste the URL into the post on its own line with a space above and below.

Let’s see if this works.

It does, but the technique is a little trickier than you might thing. Remember, this is for within a WordPress.com blog, thus we have to work around some of their limitations.

The code involves creating a DIV with the alignment class for left, right, or center, plus the WordPress.com Youtube shortcode with the width and possibly height set.

<div class="alignright">

</div>

In the link to the Youtube video you should see &w=400&h=450. This sets the width of the video to 400 pixels, narrower than the typical 500 or so, and the height to 350 pixels. Every Theme has a different column width so you will need to play around with these to get them the right size for your WordPress.com site.

This is what we call a “hack,” a way around the typical way of doing things. I recommend you save this in a reference text file so you can copy and paste in the video link next time you try this in a post.

Thanks, Alex, for experimenting with this!