Friday Q&A: Videos in Our Emails

Error on Green by Paul Klee

Q: I’m an email subscriber to your blog. Unfortunately, when you include a video in a post, I just get a black box. So I can’t play the video. Can you please fix this?

A: I wish I had a good answer to this! I’ll start by telling you the easiest way to play the video. Then, for those who are interested, I’ll explain why this problem occurs. Finally, I’ll explain why we are set up so problems like this one are unfortunately beyond our control.

How to Play the Video

The easiest way to play the video that is in an email article is to click on the title of the post (not the title of the email). This appears as a link in your email (possibly colored blue). And clicking on that link will take you to the original post on our blog site, where you can simply play the video on the blog.

Here’s how the article looks in Google Mail, where I don’t get a black box—I just don’t get anything. The title in blue is the link to the original post.

Why is there an Error?

On our blog, we are able to “embed” videos from YouTube in our posts. So you play them from directly from the post without going to YouTube (which is where the videos actually live). We think this is a great feature!

Unfortunately some (or perhaps all) email systems do not allow videos to be embedded in email. They can have text and photos in them, but not videos. So although the original post has a video in it, the message in your inbox can’t include it.

Why Can’t You Fix This?

While some people refer to the emails they receive from us as our “newsletter,” that is not technically what they are. Instead, you have signed up for a free Google service called Feedburner that automatically emails you every time we update the blog and sends you a text only version of the blog post. (At least Feedburner documentation says the emails are “text only” but I’ve noticed photographs do come through—who knows…. Still, it is clear that videos don’t come through.)

Now while Feedburner is not without its flaws, it has two qualities that I like: it is automatic and it is free. So until and unless I find an alternative that, likewise, is also free and automatic, I will continue using Feedburner. (Notice I’m saying “I” not “we.” That’s because I’m solely in charge of the technical side of things. All of the other writers just email me articles. I, myself, do all the work of formatting posts and maintaining/troubleshooting the blog.)

If you decide you don’t like getting the emails because there are too many (we have had that complaint), you don’t like the format, or for any other reason, you can always unsubscribe by clicking on the Unsubscribe link in the email. Then you can just read the latest posts on the blog site by going here directly.

We also use a free service from Google called Blogger to create our blog. It also is not without its flaws. I’m not a fan, for example, of how hard it is to find the special pages on the blog or to sign up for email in the first place. But, again, this is a free service and I find it quite easy to use for formatting blog posts. In my dreams, we have a special web site instead that is custom-designed just for us, but that would cost a lot of money, as I’d have to hire someone to design and program it. And as we receive no income from the blog (it’s a non-profit offering), that's not a real possibility.

If anyone out there wants to nerd out by learning even more about how the blog is put together and how the email service works, see my earlier post From the Inside Out: Our Blog and Our Email Service.

And I always welcome technical assistance of any kind, if any of you have some ideas that might help.

—Nina

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From the Inside Out: About Our Blog and Our Email Service

by Nina

I’ve received a number of emails about our YFHA email service this week, so I thought it might be a good time to explain some things about our blog and our subscription service. Understanding the tools that I am using (all the work is being done alone by yours truly, Nina Zolotow) to put the blog together will help you realize what the built-in limitations are and will perhaps make you more forgiving about problems that you might encounter. 

First I’ll tell you about the tools I’m using to create the blog. Then I’ll discuss the recent change in your email. And, finally, for those who have not yet signed up for or who are having trouble signing up for email, I say something about the process you need to go through to receive the emails.

Google Blogger and Feedburner

The Yoga for Healthy Aging blog is not a custom-designed web site. Rather than learning all about how to create and maintain custom web site or hiring someone to do it for me, I opted instead for a simple and free solution: using Google’s free tools for bloggers.

The tool I use to create the blog is called Blogger.

This tool was very easy for me to learn and is very simple to use on a daily basis. And not only do I not have to pay for the Blogger tool itself, but the site where the blog resides is also completely free! On the negative side, the format of the blog is restricted in many ways and there are features I’d love to include on the blog that just aren’t available. And it’s also true that sometimes the Blogger has weird bugs and glitches in it, so sometimes things don’t work as they’re supposed to. Of course, I can’t fix those problems (because they are part of the Blogger’s software), but after years of using the Blogger, I’ve learned that some of these problems eventually go away (as bugs do get reported and eventually fixed by programmers who maintain Blogger).

The tool I use to allow email subscriptions is called Feedburner. 

This tool was designed to work with the Blogger and is also very easy to use. I simply provide a way for our readers to sign up for the Feedburner service (see How to Subscribe for detailed information on how to do this), and then Feedburner takes over from there. Every time I update the blog by adding a new post with the Blogger, Feeburner automatically sends you an email with the new post. Feedburner provides a few options for customizing that “feed” but there is also a lot I can’t change. 

For a long time, people told me that they wanted the email’s subject line to contain the post title rather than just “Yoga for Healthy Aging,” and I had no way to make that happen, until recently, that is, which brings us to….

Changes in Email Subject Line, Etc.

After receiving yet another request to add the post’s title to the email’s subject line, I decided to check to see if any new features had been added or whether there wasn’t some sneaky way that I could make it happen (I have learned to tinker a bit with HTML code when I need to). Imagine my surprise when I saw this in Feedburner:

See that bit about the HOT TIP? It recommends adding a variable (that’s what that weird bit of code is) to the email subject line to get the post title into the subject. So on Monday I went ahead and added that. 

The result was this:

As you can see from this screen shot, although this trick worked for getting the title into the subject line, it also added the variable ${latestItemTitle} to the From field (as well as the Reply-to, and “you are subscribed to” fields), making it look a little weird and nervous making. More than one reader wrote me to report their concerns about this.

So, not only does this illustrate my point above about the weird little bugs and glitches in this (free!) software, but I now have a dilemma: should I remove the ${latestItemTitle} variable from the email subject and return things back to the way they were or should I leave things as they are now?

Or, are you just getting a headache thinking about this? Anyway, if you care to weigh in, let me know in the comments section, in a private email, or on Facebook. (Or, if there are any computer nerds out there who have some suggestions for how I can finesse this or any other problems with the blog, let me know.)

Signing Up for Email

As I said earlier, our email subscription service is managed by Feedburner. For you to sign up for that service is a multi-step process. See How to Subscribe for a detailed walk through of the entire process (I used to be a technical writer). Yes, it’s a bit complicated, but once you’ve gone through the process, you should be all set.

I have noticed, however, that a number of you have signed up for the email but didn’t complete the process. (For privacy, I’m eliminating the email addresses from this screen shot.)

So if you have signed up or thought you signed up but have not started receiving the emails, this is because you haven’t completed the final step of verifying that you want to receive the email. So you will need to find, possibly in your junk mail folder, a message from Feedburner that looks something this:

Then you need to click on that link to verify you want indeed want the email. That’s part of the screening process the Feedburner uses and until you verify, you won't receive the emails.

Final Thoughts

Well, I hope I didn’t bore you to death today! Keep in mind that our blog is completely free to you, and is also written and maintained for free by us, the Yoga for Healthy Aging team (see About Us). We have no ads on the blog and do not receive income of any kind for our work. It’s a labor of love, people! I think that one day I will hire someone to help me put together a better web site, but for now I’m concentrating on content rather than functionality. 

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