Every time I post a video on YouTube, I go and edit my Instagram profile to update that link to always take users to my latest video. Since Instagram does not allow for links on images, people like me, use this single clickable link to direct our followers from Instagram to YouTube.
Although this is a simple and fast thing to do, I have now done it more than 70 times and I simply had enough.
That is why I’ve built YouTube Latest Link tool and made it available to the public on my tools website so other people like me can use it and update that link once and for all.
To use the tool and create your own link, you will first need your channel id that can be obtained from the URL when you open YouTube Studio. Your channel ID will be the last part of the URL, it always starts with uppercase UC and it is 24 characters in length.
My channel ID is: UCSmcxKaBEGjnwMgLIZkL_OA
Now that we have the channel id, you can paste it in the channel id field and in the URL field, you need to write your desired URL for your channel. This will be the last part of the generated URL and it is customizable.
The URLs for all of the links generated must be unique so they are served on the principle of first come first served so be sure to claim yours.
Additionally, each channel is allowed to have multiple URLs generated and they all work at the same time so feel free to generate as many as you want.
Some channels on YouTube are created as personal channels and their URLs are a bit different but they are supported as well. Similarly, as with the channel id, you need to copy the last portion of the URL and paste it instead of the channel id.
The entire tools section of my site is built with Laravel, Vue.js, and TailwindCSS so the YouTube Latest Link tool is no different. A single Vue.js component with a single controller and several routes creates records in the database for every pair of channel id and URL.
The generated link points to a special route that then identifies the channel from it and tries to load the RSS feed for that channel or user. When that RSS feed is properly loaded, the code then retrieves the latest record in it and extracts the video link.
To reduce the number of hits and parsing of this RSS feed, I’ve added a caching feature to it so the URL is cached for 6 hours right now. Let me know if you think that I need to change this.
With the latest video link extracted, the final thing is to redirect the user to that link and they can then watch that video.
The tool is provided for free and so is the entire source code that is available on GitHub. Feel free to use it and post your generated links in the comments. If you are a developer feel free to integrate this code with your site so you can have such a custom URL on your site directly.
If anyone is interested, I can also offer a paid integration service to add this feature to your website directly. Best way to to contact me is to write me on any of the social pages that I have at Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
So I hope that you like this tool and I also hope that it will be beneficial to some. If you start using it then please let me know down in the comments don’t forget to subscribe and I’ll see you in the next one.
