Clicking in email re-directs to Youtube, not website - any work around?

Using Ghost
1

Hi all. I do motivation videos on my site. I record them, upload them to Youtube, and then embed them into a post that goes out each morning.

I would rather put them directly on the site but the ghost plans have such small upload limits (100mb??) a 3 minute video is way too big. Because I have to push the videos to youtube and embed them, when someone receives the email notification about the post, clicking on the video takes them to YOUTUBE and not to my web site.

Is there any way around this? Could I use some other video platform to fix this? Open to idea!!

1 Like
2

When you construct your message to be emailed, instead of using the youtube embed, put in an image thumbnail for the video (with a nice play button on top if you like), and LINK it to the post.

Then, if you’re doing both newsletter and publish, after you’ve sent the newsletter, update the post to use the youtube embed instead.

I /think/ that should work, but I’d test it with a test user before deploying to a whole mailing list. :)

1 Like
3

Thanks, @Cathy_Sarisky for always jumping in to help! When I do as you suggested, the email click does, indeed, take me to my website (yay!) but then when I click on the video thumbnail I created, that takes me to youtube (because I’ve linked the PNG thumbnail to the video on youtube). Embedding allows me to playback youtube video while keeping the user on my platform. Am I misunderstanding your suggestion ?

EDIT – sorry I see your suggestion now to go back and edit the post after sending the email. That’s not ideal for my use case as I schedule a dozen posts well in advance, and many go live at 5am or 6am.

I wonder if any other embed method would be better?

4

You could use the newer duplicate post feature to make the small change to your emails in a copy. Schedule one variant as email only and one as web-only. You if you self-host, you can upload videos as big as you’d like.

5

I like this idea – could they have the same name? Meaning if I click into the email will it take me to the copy?

6

I use variation of this pattern myself:

First I make a blog post and schedule it to post to be email and the web. Then I duplicate it and create a near-identical “reminder” email that scheduled two weeks only.

As long as you create the “real” blog page first, that process will generate a slug for you, like “/my-real-post”.

Then when you duplicate it to create an “email-only” version, you can modify the email-only version so that it has links explicitly back to your-domain.com/my-real-post – for example where you want have a thumbnail of a video that links back to the post.

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Mark, does that work for the “view in browser” link?

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Unfortunately, no. The email-only version would like to a special /email/ URL that would display exactly the contents of the email.

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I figured out one work around - I can embed some content from dropbox, so I can store it on my own cloud storage and link to it. Some content that I use LIVES on youtube so it’s a partial solution, but it’s something! Wish we could get in and edit the HTML of the emails that go out without changing the posts themselves

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10

Would be nice to have some control over how much of a given post appears in the email that is sent. It would not only solve this problem, but it would act as a little teaser so you could send the post of people who have no access to it (due to membership tier) and they could get a little taste of what their missing.

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If you want to send a teaser post, you could do that right now pretty easily. Create the full post for web, including all the embeds. Add a ‘public preview’ and set access. Schedule it to post (not email). Then create the teaser newsletter post, that links to the full post. Schedule it for email only. Add an HTML card with a little piece of javascript that redirects browsers (won’t run in email clients) to the full post, for any users who click ‘view in browser’. Since you want everyone to click through to the web page, you don’t even need to set up access on the newsletter post, since no one is getting more than the teaser by email anyway!

Make sense?

1 Like
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Yes? Let me tinker with that a bit, sounds promising! Thank you!

13

@markstos How do I make the email only post redirect to the published post with videos?

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little piece of javascript in an html card:

<script>
    window.location.href = "/path/to/post" 
</script>
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15

Here’s a hacky idea.

The View in Browser links for emails go to locations like /email/$ID

Once you know what that ID is, you could add a redirect to redirects.yml to redirect all visits there to the web version.

But now we are talking about several steps each time you make a post!

A better solution would be for Ghost to offer a “web-only” card the same way the offer an email-only card. Should be simple enough to implement. There are still plenty of HTML features that are restricted in emails so there could be a lot uses for offering alternate content versions besides video handling.

1 Like
16

Yeah. It would be ideal to have some more control over what goes into the email rather than just an email version of the post. Appreciate your input and the help!

17

If you figure that the JavaScript redirect above won’t run on email, that’s pretty close :)

1 Like
18

I don’t know how to create an HTML card, where does one do that?

19

It is an option in the ghost editor. Hit the big plus button and scroll, or type /html on a blank line in the post body.

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The email-only version would like to a special /email/ URL that would display exactly the contents of the email.