How to subscribe to a YouTube channel's RSS feed.

YouTube frequently makes changes that make it harder to keep up with your subscribed channels, but RSS still works. The instructions for using it are wrong though, and have been wrong for an extremely long time. They're also hard to find. So here's how to do it.

1. Get an RSS client (eg. Thunderbird. The following instructions will assume you're using Thunderbird but should be basically applicable to any feed reader).
2. Create one or more folders under "Feeds" to categorise your subscriptions. Or don't.
3. Right-click a folder (or "Feeds") and click "subscribe".
4. Under "Feed URL" paste "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=" (without the quotation marks).
5. Open your web browser and find a channel you want to subscribe to.
6. If the URL contains the name of the channel (eg. https://www.youtube.com/user/Wallsy) then:
1. Open one of that channel's videos and then click the channel name under the video to return to the channel page. This time the URL should be different.
7. If the URL contains a string of gibberish (eg. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJpPXZwyo0fgu3h94R3P5pA), copy that gibberish.
8. Switch back to Thunderbird and paste the gibberish from the channel URL at the end eg. https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCJpPXZwyo0fgu3h94R3P5pA
9. Click "Add". Links to the latest videos from that channel should now be retrieved. You can set it to check for more videos automatically or just whenever you click the "Get Messages" button.

Amazon reviews are bullshit

OK, not really. But their system for moderating them certainly is, and that does raise a few issues relating to their accuracy and usefulness. But to get into this properly I'll need to go back to an email I got a few months ago. As happens from time to time, someone asked me to review a shitty book.

Ads

Today, while looking for the many perfectly legitimate torrents of public domain things that I like to download, I noticed a couple of ads.

Comics Kingdom

An open letter to King Features Syndicate

Just read your "One Year of Comics Kingdom" email and I'm stunned at the audacity of your claims. You've "enhanced the look and feel of the newsletter"? Are you serious? They look like garbage now. Supposedly this was to make them look better on mobiles, but I don't read my emails on my phone, so to me it's a clear downgrade.

The biggest crock though is where you claim that the Comics Kingdom website is "quick-loading" and "responsive". I've got to wonder if you've even seen the site. It's slow, inconvenient and just generally awful. I cannot understand how anyone could claim that Comic Kingdom is in any way an improvement over DailyINK. From my perspective it's worse in every way.

And as for its mobile-friendliness, the site takes so long to load on my PC I wouldn't even consider trying it out on a mobile, especially if I were using 3G rather than wifi. Having archives access has become mostly pointless (even as you've expanded the availability) as it takes so long to load each strip that reading through old ones is more of a chore than a pleasure.

And this is not a new problem, nor can you claim ignorance of it as I've complained about it on several occasions. Your site is arse and your constant claims that it is somehow improved over the old one are salt in the wound. You've had a year to get this working. Fix your damn site.

Australian Kindle owners

Amazon is trying to get Australians to switch to amazon.com.au but apparently if you do this you lose access to the ebooks you purchased from amazon.com. Here's log of (part of) the conversation I had with one of their support people:

Me: Lately amazon.com keeps telling me I can switch to amazon.com.au for ebook purchases. Is there any benefit to doing that other than seeing prices in AUD? It seems like a hassle to be using the .com.au site for some things and the .com site for others, especially when AUD and USD are so close in value anyway.

Regie(CSA): The reason why the system keeps telling you to transfer your account to Amazon.au it is because you're country settings is from Australia, correct?

Me: I am in Australia, that is correct.

Regie(CSA): That's is the reason, Mathew.

However, you can ignore the email about the migrating, Mathew.

Me: It's not an email, it;s a message that keeps appearing at the top of the page when I view items at amazon.com

And my question is, is there any benefit to switching, other than seeing prices in AUD, or is that the only thing that would change?

Regie(CSA): No, Mathew.

Regie(CSA): If you switch to Amazon.au, all your books that was purchased from Amazon.com will not be available to view or read unless you switch back to Amazon.com.

...

Me: Why would anyone want to switch their account if it will remove access to the books they already purchased? This is insane.

Regie(CSA): I do apologize, Mathew.

We don't have the information/

...

Me: OK, so is there some way I can make sure my account doesn't ever get switched to the au site? Because I don't want to lose access to my books.

Regie(CSA): No need to worry, as long as you will not accept the migration.

Me: So there is no way for me to just say "no, I don't want to switch" and have that be the end of it? It's just going to keep asking me forever?

Regie(CSA): Yes, Mathew.

I can't imagine what the hell they're thinking with this decision.

Yahoo! Cares

I got an email recently telling me that Flickr has new features or something. As far as I was aware I had never used Flickr and didn't give two shits about its new features, so I went to the site to try to delete my account and unsubscribe. This proved more trouble than expected.

Jraphics Interchange Format

Why are gifs still a thing? If I want to watch a full-screen video with sound on YouTube, i just click it and it starts playing. No buffering, no loading time, no pauses or skipping, it just goes. If we can do that, why the fuck do I still have to wait so long for a low-res, silent animation?

How is there not a better format for embedding looping animations? Why has no one invented that?

Height, Width and Depth

I often like to buy things online, to save the inconvenience of having to find the shop that sells the type of thing you want and wander around from shop to shop finding one that has one that suits you. I much prefer to just type what I want and have the options presented to me so I can just choose one and buy it. This works perfectly well in some cases, but there are some confusing exceptions.

Amazon support

Sometimes Amazon's support is just bizarrely unhelpful. I sent them an email today asking why my personal documents aren't showing up on the Kindle app for PC, and their response to me was just "Sorry, we can't help you by email, please contact us by chat or phone." No reason or explanation was given for this, so I followed their instructions and used the chat support option.

I did a survey

Roy Morgan offered me $3.70 (500 points that I can put toward the 2700 points I'd need for a $20 voucher) to do a survey, so I decided to do it. I've seen all these questions before, because they're the same ones I sometimes get other people to answer when I'm working for Roy Morgan, and some of them are really dumb, so I thought I'd share them.

I don't get this ad

If publishing your secret angers doctors, that usually means it's dangerous or unhealthy. If it also makes your face bleed when you do it, that's definitely a sign that you should stop. Also, that woman doesn't look 27.

YouTube layout

Recently when I went to look at some videos on YouTube I noticed that the layout had changed from a grid to a list, and the button that used to control that setting was gone. I asked around and found that others were still seeing the grid view.

Your entertaining stories infuriate me!

I've recently been reading some forums on which people were telling entertaining stories about things that happened to them. Mostly people just post stories or make comments, whatever, good times for all. But then some dickhead comes along who is absolutely convinced that something someone said might not be 100% true and that this is a crisis of epic proportions.

Why are there children on the Facebook?

Seriously, the Facebook is not an appropriate place for children.

Stuff That is Good

Just my recommendations for some free stuff you can find on the internet, some comics, blogs and other things. They're all really good, you should read them.