YouTube has been a godsend for many bloggers who create video for whatever reason. In fact, I had used it to upload a bunch of presentations that my students had made over the last year or so, but towards the beginning of the year, when Dreamhost updated its own media facilities to include an FLV player, hosting and an embedded in WP plugin, I was all set.

YouTube had increased the restrictions to 100mb of upload, and a maximum of 10 minutes. Now, with Dreamhost, I could create videos of any length, and did so. But, I was frustrated. There was no easy way to put the videos together, to create a kind of TV channel. I could do so by posting everything within individual posts, and visitors could click through each post by themselves. But it really doesn’t have the “Channel” atmosphere.

Recently, though, I had a look at YouTube again, which I haven’t logged into for sometime. Lo! and behold, they’d created a ‘customer player’. There are two kinds, I much prefer the other one, but this one fits the pages of my website, nicely.

Step 1: In fact, it’s quite easy to do this. Log into your YouTube account, scroll down to find the ‘custom player’ section.

Step 2: Click to create a custom player, and you’ll be taken to the appropriate page.

Step 3: Enter your information, and choose the color scheme from one of the nine options.

Step 4: Choose your layout style, I like the second, but it’s too wide. The first one has an interactive style that is very attractive, though. (It’s featured above).

Step 5: Your content needs to be organized in a playlist (I’ll assume you know how to do that!). Select your playlist, and hit ‘select’.

Step 6: Then click on ‘generate code’ and you’ll get a lot of code to embed just like a regular video. Paste the entire code into your website as-is. Hit ‘save’ and ‘publish’ (if you are using WordPress).

Then you’re done. You should see something like the video screen at the beginning. Have fun.