{"id":2960,"date":"2015-07-03T11:00:30","date_gmt":"2015-07-03T10:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.payneful.co.uk\/blogsplosion\/?p=2960"},"modified":"2018-12-17T09:57:02","modified_gmt":"2018-12-17T09:57:02","slug":"the-payneful-portfolio-creating-a-new-youtube-subscription-feed-or-how-to-replace-your-youtube-subscription-feed-now-google-has-ditched-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.payneful.co.uk\/blogsplosion\/2015\/07\/03\/the-payneful-portfolio-creating-a-new-youtube-subscription-feed-or-how-to-replace-your-youtube-subscription-feed-now-google-has-ditched-it\/","title":{"rendered":"The PAYNEful Portfolio – Creating a New YouTube Subscription Feed (or How to Replace Your YouTube Subscription Feed Now Google Has Ditched It)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note:<\/strong> if you’re looking for code, there’s a link at the bottom of this article where you can get a copy. This article just explains what the code does.<\/p>\n

About a year ago, Google mentioned casually that they would be getting rid of YouTube subscription feeds<\/a>1<\/a><\/sup>. Earlier this year they finally made good on their threat and turned the feed off for good. This wasn’t a big problem for many people who don’t use RSS in their daily lives2<\/a><\/sup>, but for me it was a damn nuisance as I like all my updates in one place.<\/p>\n

Google courteously explained that although the main YouTube feed was going away, you can still access individual channel feeds<\/a>. No problem, right?<\/p>\n

\"TheOldReader\"
Hmm.<\/div><\/div>\n

My preferred feed reader, the Old Reader<\/a>, has a limit of up to 100 subscriptions on the free plan, and I have 435 subscriptions on YouTube alone. Please understand that I don’t have a TV licence as most of my video entertainment comes via YouTube and other online outlets, so it’s like being subscribed to 400+ channels that I actually want rather than paying Sky or Virgin for 900+ channels that I don’t want!<\/p>\n

I refuse to pay money for extra subscriptions just because Google want to drop a service, so I decided to just build a subscription feed myself. How hard can it be, right?<\/p>\n

Fetching the Feeds<\/h2>\n

Google did one good thing at least – at the bottom of everyone’s YouTube subscriptions management page is a button allowing you to export all your channel subscriptions to one OPML<\/a> file. This file would make the basis of my new feed.<\/p>\n

\"YouTubeSubs\"
In case you’re playing along at home, here’s where that fabled button is.<\/div><\/div>\n

The file itself just contains data pertaining to where all the individual feeds are and some meta data (titles, channels, etc.).<\/p>\n

\"YouTubeOPML\"
It looks like this – I’ve actually indented it here to make it a bit more readable as the file comes with one long line of data in it.<\/div><\/div>\n

My plan was to have a URL3<\/a><\/sup> that the Old Reader can invoke and pull all the new items from. I know that the Old Reader is clever enough to know which links it has presented before, so all I needed to do was make sure that fresh links within the last day or two were showing and the reader would take care of the rest.<\/p>\n

My website is built (mostly) in CodeIgniter<\/a>, so I created a new controller class devoted to processing all my feeds. I hard-coded a “key” to pass in to prevent people other than my feed reader from accessing my subscriptions, and pointed the script to look at the folder where I would keep my current OPML file. Note that I am hard-coding a lot of things here which isn’t 100% in the spirit of “flexible code”, but it’s going to serve a specific purpose for me rather than being open to the public so it will do!<\/p>\n

\"YT_Script01\"
I’ve blacked out some of the more sensitive areas here so people can’t start picking my website security apart!<\/div><\/div>\n

Unlike the horrendous non-standard markup I encountered when trying to process bookmark files<\/a>, Google’s OPML is well-structured which means we can use the proper XML parsing tools built into PHP! We load the contents of the file into a SimpleXML object<\/a> and loop through to collect the two most important items we need per YouTube channel – the title of the channel and the URL location of where the relevant feed can be found. Note that we have to “cast” the node into a string<\/a> as PHP will try (and fail in) reassigning the object node to a variable otherwise.<\/p>\n

\"YouTube
It’s quite fiddly figuring out which nodes to loop through, the best thing I find is to just keep referring back to the source file and indent it out to work out where each node is and what it contains.<\/div><\/div>\n

We now have an array of feed URLs. I pass this into a function called _process_feeds() and inside that function we will now need to do the following:<\/p>\n