I'd previously explored 2 options for embedding videos in Jekyll posts (I'm hosted oh gh-pages, and so am limited in the available plugins):

  1. Placing an image in the page, which links to another site (such as Vimeo or YouTube) to play the video, as discussed in an earlier post.

  2. Use the full embed code, as you can copy from Vimeo or YouTube, such as:

{% highlight html wrap %}

While these work, I didn't like that for #1 visitors are taken away from the site, and away from the context of the video, and #2 is a little cumbersome for my mobile phone based editing workflows.

In this post I am experimenting with a 3rd way - which involves creating a simple .html file in _includes directory, which contains the full embed code, and into which we can pass the YouTube ID, then you can embed the video in the following way:

{ % include youtubePlayer.html id="IvUU8joBb1Q" %}

{% include youtubePlayer.html id="IvUU8joBb1Q" %}