Mixtape
I built a website to create and share YouTube playlists outside YouTube.
Recently I've been experimenting with the idea of YouTube playlists outside YouTube. I built First of October Radio, and since then I've had a bunch of ideas for websites that use YouTube playlists. Mixtape is one of those ideas.
Mixtape has some interesting features. Its home page has an ever-evolving tape with 7 videos that change every day. This tape is fed by a Google Spreadsheet that exports a public CSV.
There's the Tape Box section, in which I share tapes (also hosted on Google Sheets). These tapes are playlists created by me and only exist on my site.
There are also the Phantom Tapes, which only exist as a hyperlink containing the data needed to build the tape at runtime.
I guess Phantoms are my favourite type of tape. They are the most fragile and ethereal of the tape types I designed. They don't really exist — they aren't recorded, nor do they live in a table or spreadsheet. They're just data held by someone. The only way to listen to one is to receive it in link form.
It's interesting to note that I lost a Phantom Tape during testing. It was "saved" on my clipboard, and I copied something over it — so it was gone. Forever. This stoked some feelings of loss and longing for my — not really — beloved tape. Losing a testing tape isn't as bad as losing a carefully structured and curated one, but it still feels bad to contemplate the fact that my testing tape is no more...
All tapes can be remixed into Phantom Tapes; however, there's a limit to the number of videos per tape due to the link size of the resulting tape.
All things considered, I am pleased with my investigations into frailty and ephemerality in digital form.
Stack
HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Three.js, Google Sheets, Google Forms, YouTube iFrame API, Claude Code.