Running into trouble embedding your deck on your WordPress blog? Not to worry. This should help.

This makes me sad. If you're here, you probably know this sadness too.

By default, WordPress uses something they call oEmbed to automatically embed stuff from URLs you include in your blog posts. It will automatically embed content from URLs like YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, etc, and a little over a dozen other sites. This is intended to make it easy to embed things from those sites, while preventing URLs from automatically turning into embedded content you didn't want to feature. Since we're not on that list, it converts your embed code to a link to your deck.

We have a message in the code for our website that basically says, "there's safe embeddable content right here, WordPress!" Since your blog won't be looking for that message by default, though, it gets missed, which is why embedding won't work right off the bat. Installing a plugin just helps your blog pick up that message to embed your content.

In order to install the plugin to embed your decks, you need to have a self-hosted blog (through your site or another hosting service and WordPress.org, not WordPress.com), an FTP client to add the plugin to your blog's files, and the login information to access your hosting storage. Don't worry - I'm about to go into this a little more in-depth.

A quick way to tell if you're self-hosted or not is to log into WordPress to where you'd normally add blog posts, and look for a "Plugins" option on the left. If you're not self-hosted, the best workaround we've found is to take a screenshot of a slide you'd like to represent your deck, insert it into your blog post, and make it a link to your actual deck URL. To take a screenshot on your iPad, just press the home and sleep/wake buttons at the same time. It'll be saved to your Camera Roll.

You know how you can open an app on your phone to read your email, or pull up a program on your computer to look at your documents? FTP programs are a lot like that, but they provide you with access to the files for your website and/or blog. Many are available for free, like Cyberduck and FileZilla:

http://cyberduck.ch/
https://filezilla-project.org/

You might also be able to sign in and access your hosting space on your provider's website, too.

You might have different credentials to access FTP for your site than you normally do for logging into your provider's website. Why? Imagine you pay for a website for your business. Three employees can update and edit the site. There are separate FTP logins for them to access your hosting, so they can't change your account, see your billing details, etc. The good news is, your provider can usually help you out if you have trouble. (I personally forget my FTP password all the time and reset it on my provider's site).

No, it's not intended to make your blog smell like "Caribbean Escape," although who knows what the future might hold.

It goes like this: they plug Neo into a machine, into which a floppy disk-looking thing is inserted. After about 5 seconds of Keanu Reeves looking like he has brain freeze, he has been programmed to know Jiu Jitsu. They keep doing that with various other martial arts until Morpheus challenges Neo to a Kung Fu duel. It's pretty cool, and way more complicated than a WordPress plugin. The Matrix wouldn't have done as well in the box office if Neo learned how to be awesome at WordPress.

Or, just click this link:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/enable-oembed-discovery/

Where it will download to depends on the settings on your computer or browser, but by default, most browsers on the Mac will go to Finder (the little smily blue guy in the bottom left corner of your screen, on your dock) in your Home folder (usually has your name and a little house icon on the left), in "Downloads."

Just double-click the downloaded file. This expands its contents into a new folder.

This goes back to that business on slide 8 about how you're going to access your hosting info. If you sign into your hosting provider's site, you may be able to just access your hosting from there, and navigate to the folders I explain on the next few slides. Otherwise, I recommend downloading a free FTP client like Cyberduck or FileZilla.

So, just to clarify, you need to move the entire folder, including everything in it, into that plugins folder on your hosting space. Don't worry about the original, downloaded zip file - that thing can be tossed in the trash, if you'd like. You don't need it once it's created that folder we're copying into your plugins.

Take a deep breath, and pat yourself on the back (but not too hard).

If you don't see a plugins option on the left, go back to slide 7 for workarounds to include your decks in posts on non-self-hosted blogs.

*jazz hands*

This is the final step! I'm not sure if it's required, but I needed to do it when I was testing this out. Once I clicked update, the embed code worked just fine. Hopefully it will do the same for you! If not, go here to let us know:

https://docs.google.com/a/giantthinkwell.com/forms/d/1EMFlDtFKXgBL9cY75Dpjo...