I am taking the Blogging 101 course from WordPress.

Today’s Assignment: publish a post you’d like your ideal audience member to read, and include a new-to-you element in it.

I tried to think of some famous person to be my ideal audience, but couldn’t think of a soul. The assignment said thinking of a specific person helps focus your thoughts and goals for the blog. When I write my blog, I do have a specific composite person in mind. The people who have been reading my logs and blogs since 2001 form that composite person. Family members, old neighbors and co-workers and new friends we’ve made along the way: you are my ideal audience. It feels like writing to the folks back home.  You care a whole lot more than some famous person ever would.

My new element is to embed is a YouTube video. Fortunately, the WordPress folks provided instructions.

It is easy to pick one out; I’ve been singing along with Loretta Lynn for months now.  We are having a Grand Ole Opry party at the yacht club this Saturday night and I am going to be Loretta Lynn.  I have a fancy dress similar to the one in the video, but with a straight skirt. I have a long black wig and even bought a dark eyebrow pencil to color my invisible blonde eyebrows. I don’t watch the whole video.  I just slide the little slider along until she goes to the microphone and starts singing.

Here goes:

That was easy.  All I had to do was copy and paste the URL from the Loretta YouTube page to my post. Now I can preview my post to see if it worked.

Nope.  All I got was a link to the YouTube page. Perhaps I should read more of the instructions. Yes! To get a preview of the video embedded, I had to put brackets around the URL like this:  youtube the URL here. I can’t put the brackets on it to show you; it doesn’t show up in the post.  [but you know what brackets look like]

If somebody take a video on Saturday night, I’ll post one with me singing instead of Loretta.  Yeah, I’ve sung along with her on YouTube so much that we are on a first-name basis now.