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Creating a personal internet video channel

I love internet video but sometimes I find it fiddly to watch the programs I want to watch. So i decided to try and use some online tools to create a personalised video channel of all the programs I wanted to watch. So I made g-geek.tumblr.com. In this post I explain why and how I made this automatic updating website of lots of free geeky programs. 

Will Wheaton's board game show Table Top is one of my shows 

I think web shows are a significant shift in the media landscape. The internet as the great leveler of the playing field allows anyone to produce material with no budget. With no production cost the focus is on the material. I have a number of geeky interests and others create some great web shows about it. The delivery channel for all my chosen shows is YouTube (but other services like Vimeo can do it). Problem is I kinda hate the youtube interface. For a number of reasons. 

  1. It isn't easy to subscribe to individual playlists
  2. You can not filter the videos from people/channels you subscribe to 
  3. I have to click off the page to start the content
  4. It just looks messy! 

So my aim was to make a simple clean website that I could set up to automatically populate with my favourite web shows. This was only possible because of the awesome website ifttt.com. If you have not heard of ifttt.com then you should give it a go. This website is a fantastic web service that can automate lots of online tasks. For example, copying all your twitter posts to your LinkedIn profile or automatically downloading any pictures from Facebook you are tagged in to a dropbox folder. There are lots of creative ways to use ifttt.com and I have used it for everything from at work auto-posting multiple blogs into a single company blog to getting around the great wall of China firewall to tweet. 

To make my personal web channel I made use of the ability to take a RSS feed from YouTube, put it through a filter and then post an embedded video to a tumblr blog. You can see this recipe here. The recipe includes instructions for how to use it but simply. Go to the YouTube channel you want to use. Find the name of the channel in the URL bar http://www.youtube.com/user/twit? Then put that name into the YouTube RSS feed in the ifttt.com recipe. http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/twit/uploads. Next put a filter term in the recipe to select the shows you want. For example put in "The Social Hour" into the recipe and you will post an embeded video blog every Friday evening about social media. But you would not get the "This Week In Google" show. (You can set up a recipe for an entire channel to auto post if you like all their content, which I did do for geek and sundry, Felicia Day's channel)

The recipe will then allow you to link the RSS feed into a tumblr blog you have set up. Sit back and every time the YouTube show you like is posted it will appear on your personal tumblr blog. I also used ifft.com to set it up so that every time I favourite a YouTube video it will post to my tumblr channel. Find that recipe here http://ifttt.com/recipes/51646. This helps me put things on to watch later. 

This process works for Vimeo to so this is a way to mix streams. I have set up a post my watch later post to tumblr recipe. I haven't yet found a channel I want to subscribe to yet. But I am sure the Vimeo RSS feed will work in the recipe. Just put this http://vimeo.com/thenextweb/videos/rss into the feed section. 

So if you like my channel please feel free to use it, but I suggest you go away and make your own tumblr video personalised channel. 


Quick update/addition

if you want to use videos from a specific you tube playlist you can. Just get the RSS feed for that playlist. I learnt how from http://www.hey-ai.com/main/howto/68-youtuberss

"You will need the Playlist ID from the Playlist LINK, it will look something like this: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=121D6A1AA7ADE758

From this link you need to copy the part after '?p=': 121D6A1AA7ADE758

Now copy this code to this link: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/playlists/YOUR_YOUTUBE_PLAYLIST_NUMBER (e.g. http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/playlists/121D6A1AA7ADE758)"

So far my channel will show the following shows

Flog
Google Hangouts
Written by a Kid
Table Top 
Sword and Laser 

This Week in Tech
Tech News Today
This Week in Google
Triangulation 
The Social Hour




The Super Force from my Damn Channel


Some Tekzilla (still fiddling with the filter on this one)

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Comments

Gareth Cheesman said…
Quick update/addition

if you want to use videos from a specific you tube playlist you can. Just get the RSS feed for that playlist. I learnt how from http://www.hey-ai.com/main/howto/68-youtuberss

"You will need the Playlist ID from the Playlist LINK, it will look something like this: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=121D6A1AA7ADE758

From this link you need to copy the part after '?p=': 121D6A1AA7ADE758

Now copy this code to this link: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/playlists/YOUR_YOUTUBE_PLAYLIST_NUMBER (e.g. http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/playlists/121D6A1AA7ADE758)"

31 August 2012 at 07:54
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