Yahoo! Pipe to show YouTube activity feed in Blogger, WordPress, etc.

I've had this idea for some time: somehow republish YouTube channel activity feed page as an RSS feed. So you could get a view of your latest YouTube activity in your blog, for example. This week I finally implemented a version of this using Yahoo! Pipes. This is a completely new gadget for Blogger, I have not seen anything like this before. You can use the pipe gadget output on WordPress and other internet pages, too. And you can get the RSS address for the pipe to connect it with various services and/or applications.

Link to the pipe: pipes.yahoo.com/mspotilas/youtubeactivityfeed.

And here's the "badge output" of that pipe from my youtube feed page, with 5 items:

This can be put into a sidebar gadget, like I've done in YABTB demo blog. The code to put inside an HTML/Javascript gadget is simple:

Data provided by Pastebin.com - Download Raw - See Original

You may also use the "Get as a Badge" link when the pipe is run in the pipe's page, it offers an automated gadget installation into Blogger blogs, WordPress blogs and others.

Update May 21th: Because Badge output does not work with Opera browser, you might consider using instead a gadget made by me, which works with Opera.

Parameters of the pipe:

user: youtube user name,
max-results: maximum number of items returned,
allow: only accept entries that have this word in description, for example "liked" to get only likes or "uploaded" to get only uploads,
disallow: don't allow entries that have this word in description, for example "commented" to filter out commenting activity.

So at minimum you just have to change the user parameter value from "mspotilas" to any youtube user name you want (it does not have to be yours, try for example "NBC"). In my YABTB demo blog, to show what can be done with CSS styles, I also changed background colors, adjusted font sizes and margins, changed thumbnail to right side, changed thumbnail proportions (size), and hid the footer (powered by and get this), like this:

Data provided by Pastebin.com - Download Raw - See Original

There is also a YouTube RSS feed, but... YouTube gdata feed for YouTube channel includes only uploads. No likes, favourites, comments, etc. Link to YouTube user's RSS feed of uploads is:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/youtubeusername/uploads?alt=rss&v=2&orderby=published

For example my YouTube channel's RSS feed is:

gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/mspotilas/uploads?alt=rss&v=2&orderby=published

This is my very first Yahoo Pipe, so the implementation might be a bit clumsy. But it works, at least in my tests. :) You can clone the pipe and modify it according to your needs, or use this pipe if it suits you as is. If you like it, or find some bugs or something to improve, please tell me.

Update May 20th: I found out that Opera browser is not supported by Yahoo! Pipes. :( I think I could make a gadget for the pipe which would work in Opera, too, but I'm not sure if I will. About 3 % of my blog's viewers do use Opera.
Update May 21th: Here's the gadget I made, works with Opera, too.

A post from past

Background

I started writing a blog in Finnish some time after I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Unfortunately I had had the disease for a long time, and it was already in secondary progressive stage, when diagnosed. I had already been on sickness pension because of my condition for a couple of years. I began using medical cannabis to alleviate pain and other symptoms. And the blog was about this, multiple sclerosis and medical cannabis.

First I had my blog in a Finnish cannabis forum website, where I installed Wordpress. Before I had to stop working, I was an enterpreneur and a programmer. I very much like programming. Custom installation of Wordpress was easy to modify.

After I got an official recipe for medicinal cannabis Bedrocan, I decided to "move" out from the cannabis forum website, and created a new, more personal blog in Wordpress.com. This was in February 2011. It looked first good, customization possibilities were quite limited but you could get around. But summer 2011 they for example blocked all iHerb.com-links. I wanted to tell my readers, what products I used from there, and without the links it was not working. So, pack your bags, and move to...

Blogger

I exported all Wordpress.com posts, transformed those to Blogger import file and imported to my new blog here. Customization possibilities are good here. But some things are missing or don't work. For starters I run into:

• no smiley replacement (i.e. replace chars :) by emoticon image)
• you cannot show your posts in chronological order, which you can in wordpress[.com/.org]
• Navbar search don't find posts that over week older than blog's creation date (that's why this posts date is in past)
• even the sidebar search widget did not work for me

My first big hack was the chronological posts hack. Many people miss that feature, so I decided to blog about it in English in my new Blogger blog. But then I came up with solutions to the search problems... and who knows what in the future...

Idea

So I decided to make this new blog, in English and dedicated to all sorts of Blogger tips, so my other blog won't clutter with Blogger tips. Yes, this is Yet Another Blogger Tips Blog. YABTB.blogspot.com. I created this blog September 26th 2011. Welcome. Hope you like these tips. If you do, please share the address.

Disclaimer

I have multiple sclerosis, and even I like programming I am often fatigued and cannot spend much time at computer. So I give these tips "as is", without a promise for support, if you cannot make them work. Many of the tips I implement on this blog, and you can see them working here, and you can look the source code of the pages.

My nickname mspotilas/MS-potilas means multiple sclerosis patient in Finnish.