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YouTube Web Scraping in Python

Summary of the YouTube scraper approach, and sources I used.

Over the course of 2020 and 2021, I was not very consistent with posting new content to my Word Press site (the site you are reading now). I was very active on YouTube, with a number of live streams, web tutorials and audio-visual experiments, but a large number of them were not linked in any way to my web site.

After working with someone to do an overhaul on this site (new template, restructuring content), I wanted to make posts to go with all of those YouTube videos. All I needed were three pieces of info from my YouTube channel:

Video title
Post date
Video URL

Gathering these basic pieces of data manually was not scalable (I tried). I knew there had to be a better way. A few web searches later and I was well on my way to creating a web scraper using the YouTube API and the Google Sheets API.

Once I had everything in a spreadsheet, it was easy to navigate all of the videos, copy/paste where needed into WordPress, and quickly get everything in sync.

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By jjdeprisco

Sonic explorer, sound artist, guitarist in Fricknadorable, software designer.