20 wrz 2023 | tags: rss, how-to,
tl;dr
- Get channel ID pasting channel's URL here.
- Get RSS URL pasting channel ID into following URL:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<CHANNEL_ID>
- Register and subscribe with RSS to email using for example this service
Why it has to be this hard?
And now a little elaborate on how I get ahold of how to set up RSS to email subscription specifically for Youtube as it's not this straightforward. Special kid needs special care I guess. Shout-out to Youtube for still provisioning RSS, though.
To retrieve Youtube's RSS we need to get ahold of channel ID, which is kinda tricky as it seems we only get channel handle in the channel's URL. Looking into this Stack Overflow thread, turned out futile as answers are outdated and I do not want to use Youtube API for two reasons - you need to provide APIKEY and it's kinda techy and I want for this How-to to be simple and approachable.
Luckily there seems to be some free-as-in-beer services that are able to retrieve Youtube's channel ID for as. On of them is Comment Picker. All we need to do is copy-and-paste channel's URL into the field and voila! We have desired ID.
Why Channel ID you wonder? It's required to hand-craft RSS URL, to which we could actually subscribe. I don't see any way to get this feed URL via WebUI. Shame Youtube, shame. Possibly there is a way to get it from channel's owner perspective, but as we are simple commoners we need to use ass-old 90s like ways and paste ID into below URL:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<CHANNEL_ID>
If you are RSS user, your journey ends here. Congratulations! However in my case, I stopped using RSS readers, so for my own convenience I would like to receive new feed notifications via e-mail. Once again to our help come free-of-charge neat online services. I chose the first one that came up with search engine - Feedrabbit. To get feed via e-mail, all you need to do is register and paste the aforementioned RSS URL into subscription page.
Peace out!