Hey!

I've wanted to include shorts for some time, but doing so always seemed complicated. Then I discovered that there are some hidden RSS feeds on YouTube that I wasn't aware of. For your own education, here is how it works:

Every YouTube channel has an RSS feed, which looks like this:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=cid

Where the CID is the ID of the channel. However, you can also get RSS Feeds of playlists as well. It turns out that there are some hidden playlists. One for all uploads, one for long form uploads, one for short form uploads, and one for livestreams.

• All Uploads (default): https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=cid
• All Videos: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UUcid
• No Shorts (aka long form only): https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFcid
• YouTube Shorts: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UUSHcid
• Live Streams: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULVcid

Previously, I had a hard coded filter for shorts to exclude them from videos. This allows me to not only allow shorts, but silo them in their own community!

So, now we have !videos@news.abolish.capital and !shorts@news.abolish.capital.

On Lemmy, your default language is set in your profile. You might have set your language to "English" at some point, and in doing so were not able to comment on threads here, since the only language the comms allowed was "undetermined" which is the default language for all comms and accounts (to my understanding).

Sorry about that!

We've opened a new com for Green and Indigenous news! Check out !ecosocial@news.abolish.capital!

Hey ya'll!

So I've made a change to the posting procedure of the PravdaRSS bot. Instead of checking the list of feeds every few minutes, the bot now checks every hour. It will then queue those posts in its DB and post them over the course of the next hour.

Instead of getting 16 posts all created nearly instantly, you'll see them spread out across the hour. One post every 4ish minutes, instead of 16 posts in less than a minute.

I made this change based on feedback. Because of how it posted previously, some people would experience a wall of posts in their feed, pushing out other posts. This should ensure that news stories are more evenly distributed throughout the hour, and thus not taking up nearly an entire page in the feed.

I can always adjust the timer, make it pull every 2 hours for example, but every hour seemed like a good starting point.

Other updates: I've also implemented a proper user-agent for the system, which should result in fewer publications rejecting the bots attempts to check their feds.

Anyway, hope you all have a great holiday season and a great new year!

I pushed an update tonight that will start filling out the the post body with the full article text on many more feeds.

The next goal after this is to handle feeds that do not provide full text and pull them straight from the publication URL. I'll have to be careful to not be to aggressive when doing that task to avoid getting placed on a black list.