JTF.ORG Forum

General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: WestCoastJTF on November 21, 2007, 07:33:42 AM

Title: Check out my YouTube Observation Report
Post by: WestCoastJTF on November 21, 2007, 07:33:42 AM

I've been fooling around with this...I've had a hard time keeping track of everything we have on YouTube so I whipped this up:

http://www.jtfarchive.org/youtube_report.pl

I have a job that searches YouTube nightly (at 3am) for various JTF-related search terms (described in the header of the page).  It then builds a report of all videos it finds, including links, thumbnail pics, description, keywords, ratings summary, number of views, etc.

It's subject to YouTube's Developer API limitations...you can only get 1,000 results for any search term at the moment.  Searching for "JTF" is useless because there's some game called "Joint Task Force" that has a gazillion hits.  So I narrow down by what's in the keywords and descriptions.

(http://www.jtfarchive.org/art/wcjtfheroes.jpg)

Title: Re: Check out my YouTube Observation Report
Post by: Boeregeneraal on November 21, 2007, 07:38:39 AM

Very nice-did you program that robot?

Title: Re: Check out my YouTube Observation Report
Post by: WestCoastJTF on November 21, 2007, 07:45:39 AM

Yes, it's all done in perl.

Before someone mentions it, I'm aware it's not Unicode-compliant (yet), which is why some of the video titles in Hebrew print out as garbage...I'm not used to working with non-Latin-alphabet languages.  I will fix that once I read up on Unicode.

Title: Re: Check out my YouTube Observation Report
Post by: Boeregeneraal on November 21, 2007, 07:49:23 AM

Quote from: WestCoastJTF on November 21, 2007, 07:45:39 AM

Yes, it's all done in perl.

Before someone mentions it, I'm aware it's not Unicode-compliant (yet), which is why some of the video titles in Hebrew print out as garbage...I'm not used to working with non-Latin-alphabet languages.  I will fix that once I read up on Unicode.

wow! Great work West Coast!!!
I bet chaim would be very glad about this ;)

Title: Re: Check out my YouTube Observation Report
Post by: mord on November 21, 2007, 07:52:54 AM

Thats great WestcoastJTF

Title: Re: Check out my YouTube Observation Report
Post by: Boeregeneraal on November 21, 2007, 07:54:47 AM

what other things can you program?

Title: Re: Check out my YouTube Observation Report
Post by: WestCoastJTF on November 21, 2007, 01:43:44 PM

What did you have in mind?

FYI, as regards YouTube...querying YT is easy, because they have an interface for that.  Doing something like "automatically login from 10 accounts and rate/favorite/comment on videos" is hard because they do not have an interface for that and Web 2.0 sites (like YT) are hard to automate.  There are YT bots out there...for example, a little googling turned this up:

http://www.tubetoolbox.com/