Hotmail and HTML and Wordpress

First, Gary, if you are reading this, I promise I won’t use your name below. No one will know you were the protagonist in the story.

This morning a (anonymous) friend had a question about embedding a Youtube video into his Wordpress blog. I set it up for him and gave him brief instructions how to do it a few weeks ago, but he had some trouble when he tried last night.

This morning, he said, “Clay, following your instructions I couldn’t get Youtube to work.”

I said, “Did you remember to paste the embed code in the ‘code’ section of your Wordpress blog and not the ‘Visual’?”

“Just as you said, I went to the Hotmail and pasted the code in Wordpress.”

Befuddled, I asked what he meant by Hotmail. He doesn’t even have a Hotmail account–his email is Yahoo.

“That’s what you said to do.”

“Hotmail is a web based email system.” I said.

“Well, you said to go to Hotmail, paste the embed code, and then go to Visual.”

“Hotmail?!” says I.

“Yeah. Hotmail -  H. T. M. L. - Hotmail.”

I then explained HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and not Hotmail. I was wrong about Wordpress. I thought it said ‘visual’ and ‘code’ but it says ‘visual’ and ‘HTML.’ It suddenly made sense.

We ended with me joking about blogging about the conversation. Of course I really wouldn’t do that…