There are two solutions to the problem:

1. Turn off the Visual Editor in your user options

2.  Keep Visual editor on but switch to Code mode when posting YouTube embed code

Turning off the Visual Editor

What seems to be messing up embeded YouTubed videos is Wordpress’ Video Editor. The simple solution is to just turn the visual editor off. To do this simply go to Users -> Your Profile,  then uncheck the box that say “Use the visual editor when writing”. This may be a hassle if you want to use the visual editor to edit the post or even edit other posts, because you would have to keep turning the visual editor of and on. The other solutions is to…

Keep Visual editor On But Switch to Code Mode When Pasting YouTube Embed Code

To do this just write your post as you usually would, but wait until you are just about ready to publish your post to insert the Youtube video. When you have done everything except insert your Youtube video, just switch to Code mode (click on the tab next to “Visual” just below the Title box), and paste your Youtube embed code while in Code editing mode. Then click the publish button without going back to Visual mode. It is important that you do this very last, because if you go back to Visual mode your Youtube embed code will get messed up by the Wordpress Visual Editor.

So, basically just avoid using the Visual Editor if you don’t want your embeded Youtube videos to get messed up. If you need to ever go back and edit a post with an embeded YouTube video make sure to re-paste the emded code while in Code mode if you use the Visual Editor to edit the post.

I plan to upgrade to Wordpress 2.5 in the coming weeks so if there is simpler solution or if the problem has been fixed in that version I will let you know. Please comment with your own experience if you have already used Wordpress 2.5 to post Youtube videos.

1. Buy a new domain (kreah-craze.com).

Cost: $8/yr.

Although Wordpress allows you to buy a domain through their site we decided to go with GoDaddy since we want to be eventually completely independent from wordpress.com.

2. Buy Domain Mapping from Within The Existing Wordpress Account

Cost: $10/yr.

This feature allows you to re-direct your existing traffic going to your wordpress.com blog to your own domain. So all traffic going to http://blog.wordpress.com/post/ will be redirected to http://newdomain.com/post/. At this point the blog is still technically hosted by Wordpress, but since the traffic is redirected using a 301 redirect to the new domain the search engines should recognize that the blog has moved permanently and will eventually update their index to list the new domain instead of the old one.

3. Build Links to and Promote the New Domain

Cost: It’s up to you. In our case very little.

By building links to the new domain we will help the search engines recognize and index the new domain and hopefully reclaim any loss in search engine ranking we may experience due to the switch. We will tell existing readers to update their bookmarks, and notify anyone linking to the old domain to update their links to point to the new domain. We want to get as much traffic as possible going directly to the new domain rather than being redirected through the old domain.

4. Move the Blog to its Own Hosting Independent of Wordpress.com, Run on an Independent Installation of Wordpress (downloadable at wordpress.org), and Add Ads

Cost: In our case $0 since we are just adding the domain to my existing hosting account, which allows unlimited domains. However, costs for those starting with nothing can range from a couple dollars per month up. I use HostMonster for hosting.

Once the search engines have indexed the new domain, and a significant amount of the blog’s traffic is going directly to the new domain rather than being redirected through the old domain we will cut all ties with the old domain and move the content of the blog to its own installation of wordpress on a separate hosting account. The reason this step is necessary is because up to this point the blog has still been hosted for free by wordpress.com, so the ban on ads still applied. To my knowledge you can only use the domain mapping feature as long as you are still hosting your blog on wordpress.com. When you move to your own hosting you are on your own and can no longer redirect the old domain to the new one. However, once we move to our own installation and hosting we can add ads and start monetizing the blog, which was the point to doing all this in the first place.

Additional Notes:

• When moving from an old domain to a new one using a 301 redirect you would usually keep the redirect in place permanently. However in this case that is not possible since we need to be independent of wordpress.com in order to add ads to the blog. If you were to do the switch also I would recommend waiting as long as possible before taking the last step and moving to your own wordpress installation so that more of your traffic is going directly to the new domain. Any traffic still going through the old domain when you make the switch to your own hosted installation will be lost.
• We will most likely lose some traffic no matter what when you finally do move to your own installation because there are existing links out there pointing to the old domain that will no longer be redirected, we will no longer receive traffic from wordpress.com, and we will likely experience a drop in search engine rankings. Hopefully we will build up enough traffic going directly to the new domain that this loss in traffic will be fairly insignificant.
• We are likely to lose some search engine rankings during this process because your old blog is hosted on wordpress.com which is already an established, trusted domain, and your new domain will initially be given less trust by the search engines. We can overcome this in time by promoting and building links to the new domain.
• If you were to do this switch and have an existing feedburner account it will be fairly easy to switch the feed to the new domain from within feedburner. However, if you are just using the default wordpress feed I would recommend start using a feedburner feed as soon as possible and encourage existing wordpress feed subscribers to switch to the new feedburner feed so you can take them with you to your new domain. Once you make the switch to your new domain all your previous wordpress subscribers will be lost.
• I have never actually done this before so I am not completely sure how it will all turn out. I will post an update when the entire process is complete and maybe a few updates in between. I hope for the best.

Update Aug. 27th, 2007: Kreah and I have written an update of this project at http://www.chrissandberg.com/an-update-on-switching-away-from-wordpresscoms-free-hosting/

The easiest and quickest way I would recommend starting a blog would be to go to blogger.com and sign up for a new account there. The great thing about using blogger is that you don’t have to buy a domain name or get hosting, they take care of that for you. All you have to do is follow their simple step by step sign-up process then start blogging.

Wordpress.com also offers a similar service. There are many other similar services out there, but I would recommend using either blogger or wordpress. This is just the easiest route, however. For those that are serious about blogging or want to start a website that they own completely I would recommend buying your own domain name, finding a hosting provider, then set-up Wordpress on your own domain. With all the free themes and plug-ins and the ease of editing template files Wordpress is really easy to customize and extend its functionality to include almost anything you would need for blogging.

So in a nutshell my advice to anyone who wants to start a blog download and install Wordpress on your own domain if you are serious, otherwise just get a free hosted blog on blogger.com or wordpress.com.