Posted by: admin 4 years, 9 months ago

(Comments)

Don't Surf, Feed Instead

For quite some time now, I have almost completely avoided the time sink of random Internet surfing. Every now and then I do a little bit triggered by a link recommendation from a friend, but it is a fairly rare event.

But not just because I am busy.

I have amassed a huge quantity of print and video material, downloaded in advance, which I know I want to get to eventually because I am already fairly sure it is worth my while. I have accumulated this material automatically using RSS feeds, and the occasional mailing list subscription. Tens of gigabytes of video, and enough reading to keep me going for weeks if necessary.

For instance, did you know that you can subscribe via RSS to a Youtube video channel? Since it is EXTREMELY buried in the Youtube UI (I do not even know exactly where to find the links anymore, if they are even available) here is how I do it:

• create a Youtube channel for yourself
• subscribe to the channel that contains the video you want an RSS feed of
• click on the "Subscriptions" icon in the menu bar at the top of the page
• click on the icon of the channel you want to subscribe to in the row of icons that appears below that

The resulting page has a link that looks like this:

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCbt98GNsB5wet6NO3dmhssA

You want the string at the very end after "channel/", ie. this is what you need from the above example:

UCbt98GNsB5wet6NO3dmhssA

And now we know what your podcast subscript URL will be, in this case:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCbt98GNsB5wet6NO3dmhssA

Import this URL into your podcaster. This should work until Youtube changes their API to further bury this capability.

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