Frumph

hrm. are you familiar with var_dump ?

var_dump(get_the_author_meta('ID'));

Which would output the contents of the return of that

So you’re just putting it into a URL line and having WordPress create the player, yeah? .. Then the issue is really with the player oembed that WordPress is outputting ;/

You can grab the actual thumbnail from the youtube site like this:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/1AGBix7EwVE/1.jpg

^ the img. /vi/ is different then the 1.jpg can be 1.jpg or 2.jpg or 3.jpg

You could do this ;/

add_action('wp_head', 'opengraph_make_thumbnail_for_youtube');

function opengraph_make_thumbnail_for_youtube() {
        global $post;
        if ($post) {
            $pattern = '/(?:youtube\.com\/(?:[^\/]+\/[^\/]+\/|(?:v|e(?:mbed)?)\/|[^#]*[?&]v=)|youtu\.be\/)([^"&?\/ ]{11})/i';
            preg_match($pattern, $post->post_content, $matches);
            $found_id = (isset($matches[1])) ? $matches[1] : false;
            if ($found_id) echo '<meta property="og:image" content="http://img.youtube.com/vi/'.$found_id.'/1.jpg" />'."\r\n";
        }
    }

This is untested and written from memory, but what it’s concept is you can filter the post_content of the current post and have it as an action that ads the og:image for the thumbnail be placed into the wp_head of your site

You would add this to your functions.php file

EDIT: Better regex pattern

.. it means when you type in the youtube link, you make sure the &feature=share (or related) is at the end of it

You really REALLY need to validate data on those inputs from $_POST as well

http://codex.wordpress.org/Data_Validation

like

$domain = esc_attr($_POST['domain']);

the add_post_meta requires an ID, not the whole $post object, so basically you need to save that post THEN get the returned ID it gives you and add it to the add_post_meta

.. you still use the code that puts it into the footer, but you add inline-css that makes the div absolute and positions it at the top of the site.

I’ve had to use a plugin to do that.

Like this one:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/

and there are other’s available

Dunno why that isn’t working for you, however this works for me…

global $authordata;
		$post_author = "<span class=\"post-author\">".__('Author:')." <a href=\"".get_author_posts_url( $authordata->ID, $authordata->user_nicename )."\">".get_the_author()."</a></span>\r\n";
		echo $post_author;