Perl script monitors visitor statistics for YouTube movies
Chart Stormers
Hobby YouTuber Mike Schilli is interested in whether his videos go viral. What better way to check skyrocketing viewer numbers than letting a Perl script analyze the daily trends and watch for unexpected upswings?
When a hardware hacker like myself faces a seemingly unsolvable mechanical problem – for example, when a gadget resists warranty-invalidating opening – you can typically find a solution on YouTube. And, if you need to use a less-than-intuitive program like GIMP, you will typically find an expert screencast on YouTube to help you solve complex problems, even as a newbie.
Dreamship
When I recently managed to use GIMP's Scissor Select tool successfully, I decided to create a screencast. Then, I waited for this masterpiece of movie magic to hit the charts on YouTube. I initially set monthly reminder dates in Evernote to check the number of views by hand at regular intervals. However, that got old pretty quickly, so thanks to the CPAN WebService::GData::YouTube module, I managed to fully automate the process.
For this to happen, the YAML file in Listing 1 lists the IDs of the movies to monitor [1]. I simply extracted the hex numbers from my videos' YouTube URLs. For example, the _Cxu3-UP0G8 string for the GIMP video was simply cut and pasted from the URL line in the browser displayed in Figure 1.
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