Tuesday, February 23, 2010

URLOF.COM will be shut down

For some time ago I have created url shortening service called URLOF.COM, it was used here and there in RSSHANDLER.
But recently someone used it to redirect traffic to some sites and was sending emails with links to URLOF redirects in them. GODADDY send me emails, that my domain is involved in spam, I explained them that it is only url shortening service and I cann't be responsible if someone includes my sites name in some bad email, but they didn't wanted to listen and understand anything and demanded money for dealing with this situation, so as this service does not bring much money, I finally decided to shut down URLOF.
So if you are using links via URLOF for rss feeds, you probably will have to change them and use direct links or another url shortening service.
After some time I plan to built in some url shortening directly into RSSHANDLER, so it will generate shorter urls by default.

too_many_recent_calls issue

There is frequently reported issue about YouTube quota. I am trying to solve it, did some requests optimization to see will it help or not, we should see results in few days.
If it will not help, I will also try to use YouTube developers key, as it may help to increase quota limits.
I am dealing with this issue.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Updates

I have not detected any major issue. Only problem is that some videos are not being downloaded occasianaly. It is not really clear what is the reason, but it maybe related to service or YouTube load. Maybe some blocking of excessive requests or something. I increased number of retries for downloads and this problem should be less annoying. At least it was in my tests.
Please keep reporting when there will be some problem that I have not noticed.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Problems with YouTube feeds

Several users report problems with feed updates. I'll take a look into the problem soon.

Friday, November 27, 2009

Adding YouTube videos to playlists EASY

Recently I have created small tool to add videos to playlists via bookmarklets.
It is called UNEMB and can be found at http://www.unemb.com.
Reason why I have created it, is that it is quite difficult to add YouTube videos to playlists. First, you have to start video, then you have to go to YouTube page, then select playlist where you want to see your video and only after it you can add it. It is quite annoyingly complicated and I wanted to have just one click to do it.
So I have created UNEMB, where you can create bookmarlet that you have to drag and drop to your bookmarks. It can add videos to favorites or playlists, you can have several bookmarklets for different playlists.
After you have created bookmarklet, you can go to any page with embedded YouTube video (Google Reader works great too), and just click bookmarklet. First time you will be redirected to authorization pages (mine and YouTube), but it is only for first time and will be stored in your cookies later. After first time one click will be enough and video will be stored without any further actions.
This service works in perfect synergy with RSSHANDLER, but is good also for other use cases, that's why it is hosted separately.
I am using it myself for little time and already am perfectly happy with it.
My usual use case is that I am reading Google Reader to find something new and funny and once I see YouTube video I click UNEMB bookmarklet to add video to playlist. This is special playlist, it is called 'downloads' and is like my YouTube inbox. I have this inbox configured as podcast in my mobile and in YouTubeXL on TV. And when I have enough time to watch video, I just watch them: later share with friends when it is good or just delete them when it is not.
I found this scenario very usefull and simple for myself and that's why I want to share it with everyone.
Again, service is new and it is first time when I was using Google Data API, so it maybe buggy, so please let me know if you experience any problem.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Feature request

Please write in comments features that you want most and that is not implemented yet.

Content type bug fixed

Fixed bug when for mp4 files, content type was flv.
It was a problem for some client applications.