Author Archives: futurilla

How to bulk-import your YouTube subscriptions into your RSS feedreader

11 Monday Mar 2019

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

≈ 2 Comments

Update: October 2020. YouTube broke this. See the foot of the post for my new solution.

How to bulk-import your YouTube channel subscriptions to your desktop RSS feedreader:

1. Open your RSS reader (e.g. FeedDemon) and make a new folder to hold your YouTube subscription feeds.

2. Now go to a place on the Web you probably had no idea existed, the YouTube Subscription Manager page. This page appears to be impossible to find via links from the main Subscriptions – YouTube page.

3. Scroll down to the bottom of this Subscription Manager page, and there find the “Export Subscriptions” button. This will save out a single .XML file containing all your subscriptions.

4. Load your desktop RSS feedreader software, and Import. If you have no XML import option choose OPML…

On seeking the file, the software will likely let you switch to .XML format.

5. Import, and when asked what folder to save the feeds to, choose the new “My YouTube Subs 2019” folder or whatever you called it.

They will now act as if they were normal RSS feeds.

You don’t of course get visual previews of new subscribed YouTube video content, as seen at the regular Subscriptions – YouTube. But in these days of visual click-bait and very naff graphic design, you may consider that to be a good thing.

To send the new video over to your tablet as a live clickable URL + visual preview, without any hand coding or complex privacy-invading apps, just set up a private Trello board for your YouTube picks. Drag-and-drop the video URL from your desktop browser’s URL bar and Trello will automatically form a clickable link on the created card plus a preview. Open your tablet’s Web browser, and there are your picks with previews and live clickable links to YouTube. Just as long as your tablet has Web access, they’ll play. You can of course use the Trello board for any kind of media from any service, mixing and matching in a custom slate of “to watch/listen” stuff.

You might also have success with “Send to Trello” addons for your Web browser, but the ones I found all need full account access (eek!). This Trello solution was the best I found to the surprisingly difficult problem of “send a live clickable Web URL over to my tablet” without the assistance of someone in Wheretheheckizit who wants to suck up your entire bookmarks and browsing history.

UPDATE: October 2020.

The Subscription Manager has been changed to the Channel List page, and its Export RSS feeds function has vanished.

One temporary workaround is then the Web browser UserScript YouTube RSS Feed. On refreshing a video page at YouTube, the script will show the RSS link near the name of the uploader you subscribe to, thus…

This feed URL is in the form of…

../feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCralF3lNmSNYFaFtul5apuw

This has been tested and is working.

So you should be able to go to your www.youtube.com/feed/channels page, and use LinkClump or similar to grab the URLs of the list of channel links. These are in the form of…

../channel/UCralF3lNmSNYFaFtul5apuw

And the RSS feed link is in the form of…

../feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCralF3lNmSNYFaFtul5apuw

So it’s then a simple search-replace operation to get a list of RSS feeds…

Search: /channel/

Replace: /feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=

That’s fine if you’ve only got 30 or so subscriptions. But for those with 300, 3,000 or 30,000 subscriptions to wrangle to RSS are going to need a little freeware utility to strip the YouTube page of channel links and save out a list in the form that a RSS Reader can handle.

Physical access to academic libraries

11 Monday Mar 2019

Posted by in How to improve academic search, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

Access to academic libraries: an indicator of openness? (March 2019)…

academic library policies can place restrictions on public access to [such] libraries. […] This paper reports on a preliminary study [and finds that] physical entry and access to print and electronic resources in academic libraries is contracting. […] Most affected is the general, unaffiliated public.

initial sample for the study was fourteen medium to large research universities in Australia, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Search serendipity

05 Tuesday Mar 2019

Posted by in My general observations

≈ Leave a comment

An example of the strange ways in which search serendipity can (and often does) work…

Ahead of the release of Zbrush 2019, I was searching for “npr” 3d shader in: Google Search | ‘Last Month’.

On the second page of results, I discover the ‘moved and lost from JURN a year ago’ archive of the RAF’s Air Power journals.

A search for “npr” 3d shader has nothing to do with the British Royal Air Force. ‘NPR’ being non-photorealistic rendering with ‘3D’ computer models that have been fitted with ‘shader’ materials, to make them look like hand-drawn cartoons when they’re rendered into graphical form. The results were arising because the same keywords were shared.

Air Power et al will be back in JURN soon.

NME 1978-1984 as digital scans – where?

04 Monday Mar 2019

Posted by in My general observations

≈ 1 Comment

The NME. Was there ever a weekly publication that had such a perfect confluence of writers, attitude, cultural flux, zeitgeist, popular mass appeal, content and photography? But where can one find scans of the NME music paper in its ‘golden era’ 1978-1984 run, from the Winter of Discontent to the defeat of the Miners’ Strikes?

Sadly it appears there’s still no facsimile archive, and copies sell for £10 per weekly issue on eBay. At 2019, here’s my run-through of the options:

1. The Rock’s Back Pages archive website appears to have full-text for the NME‘s ‘most important’ reviews and interviews from that period, though stripped of their inky grandeur and surrounding context and strapped into a mundane generic Web page format. As if the plain text was all that was important about such a monumental cultural and historical artefact. Back Pages appears to be pitched mainly at subscribing universities, and apparently about half in the UK currently have a subscription. Personal subscriptions are available, but cost £150 a year or £70 for three months. Even the ‘free’ articles require registration to view…

2. The British Library appeared to have facsimile page scans of the NME for 1946-2000 until about 2013, when a blog post appeared touting their “Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive 1880-2000, an “exclusive database”. But even then you could only access it in person at their London reading room. In the Archive’s current format, the NME appears to have been removed from the titles list (see the full spreadsheet for the Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive).

3. The pirates don’t seem to have yet filled the resulting public void, with their own torrent of complete scans of vintage copies of the NME. Possibly the oversized nature of the weekly newsprint NME is rather offputting, requiring a large scanner. Nor would the likely fragility of the newsprint encourage use of an automated sheet-feeder. Nor do scans of individual copies seem to have quietly filtered into Archive.org.

4. What about a CD set of scans, perhaps issued pre-Internet in the 1990s? No, that doesn’t seem to have happened.

That appears to be the state of play in 2019.