Episode: 4039
Title: HPR4039: 3 ways to keep up with Youtube Channels
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4039/hpr4039.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:54:35

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4139 for Thursday, the 25th of January 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Three Ways to Keep Up with YouTube Channels.
It is hosted by Norrist, and is about 10 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is Norrist Blast, out a quick episode about three ways.
He keeps up with YouTube Channels.
So I had this episode idea that I've been kind of half developing, and I decided to
just kind of go ahead and blast it out there.
I'll do all of the usual rigorous prep work that I do as a joke, but I'm going to talk
about how to keep up with YouTube subscriptions.
I've got a few different ways, depending on the channel and how much I like to watch.
I've got a few different ways I'll kind of keep up with it.
So for some channels, the channels that I want to watch, everything they put out, these
are ones where everything they do is good.
I'm excited about it.
I'm happy to see them pop up.
For those that just I do the regular subscribe, I just, in YouTube, I just subscribe to
the channel.
So I'm going there, and I click on the subscriptions, or my subscriptions, I'll see all that
stuff there.
That's not a revolutionary idea by any means, but it's just sort of the baseline.
Then sort of a second set of YouTube channels, or ones where I like to watch most of the
things they make, but they may have episodes that I want to skip, or videos that I want
to skip, and a lot of these are kind of fall into the category of channels where I like
most of their content, but like in addition to YouTube, they may have a podcast or something.
So they've got a bunch of kind of quick made for YouTube content, 10 minute videos about
a topic or something, but kind of interspersed in that is maybe once a week, they'll put
out a YouTube version of their podcast, and these tend to be longer, and that's just,
that's not typically what I'm watching YouTube, but I don't normally watch hour-long videos,
sometimes I will, but for the most part, that's not what I'm looking for, usually when
I'm on YouTube, it's just because I've got 10 or 15 minutes to waste, and hour-long videos,
especially if it's a podcast, that's not what I've got YouTube for, they do have a podcast,
one example is number file, it's a really good math related YouTube channel, and actually
this is a bad example because I do subscribe to their channel, but it's a good example
because it demonstrates, you know, I've got a lot of math related videos, but occasionally
they'll put out a podcast, and in this case, you know, I subscribe to their podcast, so
I'll just listen to it on my podcast player, so for YouTube channels, or sort of in this
category where I want to watch some of their content, but not all of their content,
typically what I'll do is I will subscribe to an RSS feed of their YouTube channel, I
think YouTube used to have RSS feeds for channels, but they really don't anymore, so
what I do is I self-host an app called RSS Bridge, and I'll have a link to the app in
the show notes, but what it does is it creates RSS feeds for things that don't normally
have RSS feeds in this particular case, YouTube channels, but there's a lot of other things
you may want to follow that don't have an RSS feed that you could use potentially the
RSS Bridge app to create an RSS feed for, and it's real simple to host, it's a PHP app
that doesn't require an external database or anything, so I've just got that learning
inside a Linux VM somewhere, so what I'll do is I will create for one of these channels
where I want to watch most of their content, but not 100% of their content, I'll create
an RSS feed for it using RSS bridge, and then I'll just subscribe to it, because the RSS
reader I normally use is a tiny, tiny RSS to the web-based reader, I run it on a home server,
just like I run this RSS bridge on a home server, so they're always, they can always communicate
right next to each other in the network, so it's a real easy way to get an RSS feed of
a YouTube channel, and what I'll do is if I'm in my RSS feed reader every day, so when
I notice that there's a YouTube channel, there's some new videos, I'll look and see what
it is, and if it's something I want to watch, I'll watch it, and if it's something I want
to skip, I'll skip it, easy pe-
Then the third category of subscript sends is, like if there's a topic that I just want
to be in for a while, so you know I said earlier, I don't normally watch YouTube for hours
at a time, but sometimes I do have an hour, and so what I'll do is there'll be a topic
that I'm interested in, and so I'll set up a, I'll set up something where I can just
kind of see all of these topical videos in one place, for that, when I do something
like a blog planet, so what, these used to be a lot more popular than, well back when
blogs were more popular, there would be a website, the door of planet is a good example
of where it would just be like a collection of blogs, so the planet would, the blog planet would
quote, subscribe to, you know, 10, 20, you know, a bunch of just topical other RSS beads,
and then you would go to that page, and you would see, you know, it was basically like a combination
of all of the RSS beads, just on a single page, and I wanted to do something like that
for these YouTube channels, so I was looking around for a software that would do something
like that, and I could, I could only fund one, now I'm pretty sure there's, there's more than one
that exists, I mean, maybe when I was limiting, when I was searching, I was limiting myself to
PHP, because that's it, you know, those sort of apps are really the easiest to host, and I guess
could probably do something like this with maybe WordPress, or I know that app I mentioned
earlier, RSS bridge, it's one of its capabilities is you can give it a bunch of RSS feeds,
and it will combine them into a single feed, but anyway, the app I've been using is called Moon Moon,
M-O-O-N, M-O-O-N, like the Moon, but twice, and it's a PHP app, it doesn't, it's very simple,
all it does is you provide it a list of RSS VGs, and it displays them, just like
for the word planet, or some of the other blog planets that don't seem to exist anymore,
or I can't find them, it doesn't seem to be a big thing anymore, but anyway,
so I'll self host an instance of Moon Moon, and I will provide it a list of RSS feeds that are
YouTube feeds that I made from the RSS bridge that I talked about just a second ago,
and then whenever I have some extra time and just want to sort of dive into
a YouTube topic, I'll just open the Moon Moon page, and there'll just be a long list of
videos that I have subscribed to, and you know, these are some that, you know, if I'm missing
an episode or two, or even if they make episodes or videos that I don't even know about, it's
not a big deal, it's nothing that I necessarily feel like I have to keep up with, but I just
want to, if I have some extra time, so just sort of been review the
videos that I want to watch all the time, I just subscribe to the videos where I want to watch
some, I'll create an RSS feed and monitor the channel in my RSS reader, and then finally,
for the ones I just want to binge, but it's okay if I miss some, they don't use Moon Moon to make
something like a blog style planet feed of YouTube channels. Oh, I think that's it, we've got
through it. If you have something that you're working on or in the middle of, and just blast it
out there, like I'm doing today, hacker or public radio could use some episodes, so there's not
a small barrier to entry right now, so if you have something that you've been sitting on,
just shoot it out there, certainly would be interesting, that's it, and I'll see you guys next time.
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