I wrote a program that exposes my YouTube subscriptions as a news feed. It's seriously a relief to finally have this stuff show up in [my feed reader](https://www.newsblur.com).
It's not a "Show HN" because there's no way for others to try it (yet).
Some things I'm curious about:
* Is anyone else here doing something similar?
* Would anyone like to use this service?
* Are there other YouTube-meets-news-feed features that you'd love to see?
I did maintain a list of all my subscriptions in FreshRSS for a while. I started doing this after I noticed Youtube was withholding videos from the subscription page and then showing them too me as something I might like on the home page. This really irritated me it broke my process for finding where I last was.
The problem was while I migrated in a big chunk using some jank javascript this wasn't a process that kept in sync and gradually over time it got out of date and the initial problem was fixed and I removed them all. I haven't yet seen an open source self hosted solution for this for getting the list and providing an Atom feed but its definitely something I want.
robots.txt does not "prohibit" anything. For some reason people have a misconception that robots.txt is used to block bots.
robots.txt is used to HELP bots. It tells bots what pages to visit and what pages are not intended for consumption. If a bot goes ahead and scraps everything anyway, that's entirely its own prerogative. Particularly for less sophisticated bots without a lot of storage, a good robots.txt can help it not get stuck on dynamically generated content or "useless for indexing" content.
I've always just gone to the youtube channel page, view source, search for "rss", copy the URL and paste it into my feed reader. It would be great if it was more discoverable, but it's not really like you need a whole separate tool.
I’ve built ytemail.com to fix a similar itch, mostly because I was the 0.1% that liked the YouTube email notifications before Google killed it. No open registrations, but I can hook you up if you email me at contact@<domain>.
8 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 31.6 ms ] threadIt's not a "Show HN" because there's no way for others to try it (yet).
Some things I'm curious about:
* Is anyone else here doing something similar?
* Would anyone like to use this service?
* Are there other YouTube-meets-news-feed features that you'd love to see?
The problem was while I migrated in a big chunk using some jank javascript this wasn't a process that kept in sync and gradually over time it got out of date and the initial problem was fixed and I removed them all. I haven't yet seen an open source self hosted solution for this for getting the list and providing an Atom feed but its definitely something I want.
This is very good to know!
I personally don't care, as big tech CEO already said in dawn of AI that they don't care about robots.txt
Additionally I have a project that is able to read RSS links and provides it in JSON response
https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy
robots.txt is used to HELP bots. It tells bots what pages to visit and what pages are not intended for consumption. If a bot goes ahead and scraps everything anyway, that's entirely its own prerogative. Particularly for less sophisticated bots without a lot of storage, a good robots.txt can help it not get stuck on dynamically generated content or "useless for indexing" content.