Now that I have the iPhone 3GS, and it has the awesome ability to record video (finally) and upload it to YouTube, I wondered if I would be able to have those videos automatically post to my site. Looking around, I couldn’t find a plug in that did exactly what I wanted:

• Check to see if there are any new YouTube posts within my YouTube channel every 10 minutes or so.
• If there are, grab the YouTube video identifier, modify the URL so it works with ShadowBox, download the video avatar for use in my post, link the URL for the video to the image, and place the blurb of text detailing what the video is about to the right of the image.
• Post the video on my site with the title of the video being the title of my post.
• Automatically set the avatar for the post to a video camera or video reel, whatever.

In the end, I had to do it all myself.

Not a big task, but looking at the RSS feed from YouTube, it initially seemed a little daunting. Parsing the data would naturally be the key, and as I’m not an expert in Perl, I had to rely on a simple shell script. As such, in the future if the folks at YouTube decide to change their RSS feed format, it will break everything, but no more so than it would for any other plug in, I would assume.

It took a bit, but I got it all working, and thanks to a bit of direction from “ablereach.com“, I also figured out how to add the film reel avatar for my video blog category automatically. The first example of everything working properly was this post.

All in all, I think this is awesome. I can be anywhere with my iPhone 3GS, record a short video of what it going on, or talk about my day, or whatever, then upload it to YouTube, and within 10 minutes my site will snag it from YouTube and generate a post.

I love it when I can automate simple tasks.