Sunday, 18 March 2012

My daily treat: How I got to enjoy YouTube again

I used to watch you a lot of YouTube videos before. In the past, not a day was spent without religiously checking YouTube homepage to see if any of the lovely people I was subscribed to on YouTube had made any new videos. Then I got more serious about blogging and I got behind with my YouTube activity, making videos and watching them, that is. By the time, I was ready to watch some YouTube again, YouTube had made some serious changes to the homepage that it really put me off visiting the homepage, let alone watching videos. More space was given to videos 'recommended to me' rather than the stuff I actually subscribed to, it is not possible anymore to remove select content from your subs box (you used to be able to do that by crossing clicking the X on the corner of each video) even more annoying adverts, the list goes on...


And then my lovely friend Liz aka @MidnightDraven showed me a rather genius way to keep up with my YouTube subscriptions. It's nothing revolutionary, some of you might already be using this but for me, it is all kinds of awesome.



youtube-easy-way-notification-feed-subscriptions


Ok, Get on with it. What is it then?
It's very easy. It involves installing an add-on or extension to your internet browser.

Not any browser, mind you. You need to install Google Chrome if you haven't got it already. Before all this, I didn't even have Chrome. In fact, I don't even like Chrome and I still do most of my browsing through Internet Explorer but this little add-on/extension made me my installation of Chrome a million times worth it.


The extension is simply called YouTube Feed, available for free in the Chrome Web Store and you can download it here.


000-youtube-feed-notifier-easy


They say: “This extension notifies you instantly whenever new videos are available in your YouTube Homepage Feed. These are videos that your friends or subscriptions have uploaded, favorited, liked, commented on, etc” I am not too bothered (read: I couldn't care less) about what the people I am subbed to favorited, liked and so on so I've changed the settings so that the thing tells me only about new videos.


Once you've installed the extension, you should see the little YouTube logo in the right hand side corner of your Chrome Browser. And once logged in, you can have a look at all the new videos from your subscriptions. No need to go on homepage, no adverts, no recommended rubbish, just the stuff you have subscribed to. It's simple, it's quick, it's effective and it's my daily treat when I come back from work.


001-youtube-feed-notifier-easy

Thank you very much again, Liz :)
What about you? Do you use Google Chrome?
Any Chrome extensions which changed your life?





2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I didn't know this extension exsisted, it will make browsing subscriptions so much easier, thanks for posting!

youlittlebeauty said...

I love chrome, I hate not being able to just use the main bar as a search bar when I use other browsers.
I don't know if I should download this, I waste enough time on my occasional youtube sessions as it is! :)

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