February 27, 2007
Grazring YouTube Favourites Playlists
I was just having a look at the RSS feeds that YouTube provides - and that Grazr can consume - and it seems that RSS feeds of individual playlists aren't provided.
[UPDATE - this post has largely been superseded by this one: Google Gadgets - RSS Feed Powered YouTube Playlist Player which describes a live feed scraped from a YouTube playlist, and a way of publishing it via a Google Gadget.]
[UPDATE 2: here's a live youTube playlist feed video playing Grazr widget]
As a stopgap, here's a bookmarklet that will generate an RSS feed from a YouTube playlist page (viewed either from one of your personal playlists or from a public playlist).
Pop the bookmarklet onto your browser bookmarks toolbar, visit a YouTube playlist page (like this one for example) and fire off the bookmarklet to go to a URL for an RSS feed based on that page.
Here's an example feed (generated from this OUseful YouTube playlist) and here's what happens when you view it in a Grazr widget:
You might also notice that Grazr is now CSS customisable and that a wide variety of different canned themes are available.
The"API" such as it is is as follows:
- ROOT URL: ./youTubeOPMLPlaylist.php (the final resting place will be somewhere on the ouseful.open.ac.uk site, but I can't get in there via VPN to upload stuff at the mo :-(
- ARGUMENTS: *either* id= for a comma separated (no spaces) list of YouTube clip identifiers (e.g. id=GQ3AcPEPbH0,D4upvi5ytFI,, *or* id2= for a list of comma separated (no spaces) list of semicolon delimited YouTube clip identifiers and escaped clip descriptions (e.g. d2=Xabm8hRyXrk;Zoho%20Notebook%20Announcement,nsa5ZTRJQ5w;Web%202.0,6gmP4nk0EOE;Web%202.0%20...%20The%20Machine%20is%20Us/ing%20Us,).
This is ropey as anything of course (I expect it will break if a semicolon or comma appears in the title for example), but it's okay as proof of concept and for use in (constrained) rapid prototyping reuse of YouTube playlist feeds...
Posted by ajh59 at February 27, 2007 07:50 PM