Returning to RSS

Many years ago youtube.com would allow you to have subscriptions sorted by a category. This is long since gone.

I wrote private tooling to scan the youtube RSS feeds for each channel I was subscribed to and add each new video to a designated playlist. There were playlists such as #science, #technology, #space, and of course #priority.

It turns out youtube.com didn’t like this, so they banned my account.

Ordered Lists and Labels

I use ordered lists (events in time order) to help me to understand what is going on in the world. I avoid “the algorithm” (youtube.com / facebook.com / twitter.com default) because I hate how it tries to put you into a never-ending scroll, constantly demanding your attention.

Twitter Lists

Twitter works better in Lists. It just does. Check out this Fire list I created to follow firefighting and safety-of-life organisations around the world, and especially where I lived.

On twitter, you don’t need to follow someone to put them in a List. When you do you suddenly get all their tweets in time-order, mixed with everyone else in the list also in time order. To me this is simplicity. I love it! I have lists for many things, some public lists, some private lists.

You can check out my public lists here.

Labels / Tags

To be honest, it was gmail.com that introduced me to the idea of labelling (with multiple labels) and I haven’t looked back since. It is immediately easier to be able to label / tag an item with things you can find later. It means that a single object is capable of showing up in more than one search if any of the labels match the search terms.

Try it yourself, and ask other developers to create this functionality!

Would I love to change twitter lists to twitter labels? Yes! Although twitter lists almost works the same, it would be great to view multiple lists at once. Yes, I know about tweetdeck.twitter.com and use it on-and-off as I find the need. But its not the same.

Back to RSS

There are so many great tools for RSS, I just want tools that can syncronise my RSS feeds, with labels, easily between tools or between machines. At the moment I’m using OPML stored in a git repository for this purpose, but its not ideal.

RSS with youtube?

Sure! Just view source for a youtube channel page and search for RSS.

For example the youtube RSS Feed URL for the channel Fully Charged Show is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCzz4CoEgSgWNs9ZAvRMhW2A. Add that to your RSS aggregator and you’re done! You’ll now know when a new video is uploaded.

Is it the greatest experience? Not really, I preferred my playlist manager. But it works. Almost.