Grandpa Richard's Thoughts

YouTube Scripts

An interesting twist on RSS technology has come via Youtube Scripts. I have one in use at http://www.comeandview.com involving 6 topics - Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Gimp, Irfanview, Snowboarding, and Kayaking. It took me only minutes to set these up, once the main part of the site was designed. New videos on YouTube appear automatically.

The primary advantage is the time savings. Modify a configuration file, upload files, done!

The primary disadvantage (for me) is no control over what shows up. For example, under Photoshop you could get a video about editing nude photos. Since my sites are meant to be family-friendly, that is a problem.

I probably will not use the script on any new sites. I would prefer to hand code them so that I know exactly what videos are showing. An example of this style is at http://www.richardkilleyphotography.ca/videos/ where I add the videos by hand. I also use this manual technique at the http://www.watchfishing.com/ site. The next step in this evolution (for me) will be to have the manual video selection but use the look and feel of the script version.

(p.s. what is interesting about the fishing site is that it is driven from a custom MySQL database, whereas the site with my favourite videos is a WordPress blog.)