B-san's Blog

Hi again! In my last post (Thank You To My 25 Followers!), I used some WordPress.com shortcode to add excerpts of previous posts on my blog. Today in this post, I’m going to try out some other Shortcodes and see what they can do!

Videos

WordPress.com offers video embedding for many different services including Vimeo, TED Talks and YouTube. Each service offers different functionality and editing options. Above is a YouTube playlist and below is a TED Talks video.

Hmm… I looked around but TED Talks doesn’t provide WordPress.com shortcode id anymore. Instead, copy-and-pasting the URL embeds the video in a TED block. That’s neat.

Audio

So, I went to add audio shortcode, but found there is an Audio block in the new Gutenberg editor. By inserting the Audio block, it allowed me to give a link and voilà! Here is the audio! Using shortcode will produce the following… the old audio player?

There is also a way to add a playlist, but I need the Premium plan with WordPress.com to upload audio and create my own playlist. This site is on the free plan, so I will come back to that another day. I have an idea, a legitimate workaround…?

Gallery

I was going to use the gallery shortcode, but again, I found a Gallery block! I am liking Gutenberg more and more as I write this blog.

Microsoft Office

[office src=”https://onedrive.live.com/embed?cid=57598562B950630C&resid=57598562B950630C%215432&authkey=AP65XxPoGwf4x6I&em=2&wdStartOn=1&wdPrint=0&wdEmbedCode=0″]

Wow, that is nifty! I had to open my Word Document with Office Online to get the embedding code, which was a bit of a hassle. But that is Microsoft’s choosing, not Automattic. This time, I haven’t used Shortcode as such, but got the embedding code from Office and pasted that into the text editor on WordPress.com. I had to switch to the text editor and back to the visual editor, but who cares! It worked!

Conclusion

That was just a few examples. There are many more Shortcode options listed on the support page. However, I found that many of them now have their own Block, or Widget, so you no longer have to use shortcode. While editing shortcode (text) is natural to programmers, I can see how general users would find that annoying. Switching to the visual Block editing style is a big plus and I can see why WordPress has taken this route.

I may do another Shortcode/Embedding post again. That was fun! I definitely want to try getting a playlist on this blog, so I will see if I can make that work. Let me know if any of the shortcodes/embedding on this page interested you or if there are features you would like me to test out in the future.

Thanks for reading! 😀