The lack of baked-in RSS support on YouTube is frustrating. They’ve most likely done this to force users into their proprietary subscription system and keep them coming back for more page-views. There is a single, relatively hidden FAQ page on the YouTube site that tells you how to manually create your own feeds.

Sick of googling for that page and then copying and pasting the URL and username every time I wanted to create a new feed, I’ve hacked together some bookmarklets to make things easier. Just think of them as miniature applications for the web that live inside your web browser.

To install them, just drag these links to your bookmarks bar in Firefox or Safari:
YouTubeUserRSS and YouTubeTagRSS

When you want to create a feed, just click on the proper bookmark and enter the username or tag in the resulting box (spaces are acceptable for tags ie: Alanis Morissette). Depending on your feed reader, you may need to copy and paste the resulting URL from the address bar into your reader.

Don’t know what RSS is or how it can make your life easier? Check out the Common Craft Show episode entitled RSS in Plain English. (Using Internet Explorer still? See this video for instructions.)

Update: December 20, 2009: Not sure when they did it, but YouTube has integrated RSS on their user pages and will also give you a feed for “related videos” on individual video pages.