LYTE YouTube API use warning mail

WP YouTube Lyte users might have received the following mail from Google/ YouTube:

This is to inform you that we noticed your project(s) has not accessed or used the YouTube Data API Service in the past 60 days.
Please note, if your project(s) remains inactive for another 30 days from the date of this email (November 9, 2018), we will disable your project’s access to, or use of, the YouTube API Data Service. As per Section III(D)(4) of the YouTube API Services Developer Policies (link), YouTube has the right to disable your access to, and use of, the YouTube Data API Service if your project has been inactive for 90 consecutive days.

The reason for this is that LYTE caches the responses from YouTube to ensure optimal performance. You can check your API usage at  https://console.developers.google.com/apis/dashboard. In my case it actually was not inactive although not very active either;

To make sure my API access would not get disabled I ticked the “Empty WP YouTube Lyte’s cache” checkbox in LYTE’s settings, saved changes to force LYTE to re-request the data from the YT API when pages/ posts with LYTE’s being requested again. The result:

I do have a non-neglectable number of videos on this little blog already, but here’s one more for a rainy Saturday-afternoon;

Damien Jurado - Allocate (Live and acoustic on 2 Meter Sessions)

 

Bye September, miss you already

So I forgot to post my customary love-declaration for the month of September, which is as I’m sure everyone will agree the most beautiful month in the world. But when looking outside it still feels very much like September and maybe I was just waiting for Chilly Gonzales to release this beautiful Septemberish tune, which he did last week;

Chilly Gonzales - SOLO PIANO III - Chico

How to LYTE-n up your WooCommerce video’s

So you have a WooCommerce shop which uses YouTube video’s to showcase your products but those same video’s are slowing your site down as YouTube embeds typically do? WP YouTube Lyte can go a long way to fix that issue, replacing the “fat embedded YouTube player” with a LYTE alternative.
LYTE will automatically detect and replace YouTube links (oEmbeds) and iFrames in your content (blogposts, pages, product descriptions) but is not active on content that does not hook into WordPress’ the_content filter (e.g. category descriptions or short product descriptions). To have LYTE active on those as well, just hook the respective filters up with the lyte_parse-function and you’re good to go;

if (function_exists('lyte_parse')) {
add_filter('woocommerce_short_description','lyte_parse');
add_filter('category_description','lyte_parse');
}

And a LYTE video, in case you’re wondering, looks like this (in this case beautiful harmonies by David Crosby & Venice, filmed way back in 1999 on Dutch TV);

Venice & David Crosby - Guinnevere (Live on 2 Meter Sessions)

Music from Our Tube; Prisencolinensinainciusol plus ultra

So it’s probably the crazy nineties and you have Adriano Celentano in a live show joined by the young Manu Chao (then the “leader” of Mano Negra) and they perform a weird mix of “Prisencolinensinainciusol” and “King Kong 5” and they throw in an interview during the song and there’s lots of people dancing, a pretty awkward upskirt shot and general craziness.
This must (have) be(en) Italian TV, mustn’t it?


 

WordPress, Youtube (Lyte) and the GDPR

So you (vaguely) know about the GDPR I’m sure. German netizens seem ahead of the curve, as I’ve been mainly getting questions about Autoptimize and WP YouTube Lyte from that part of Europe. It even looks like the German implementation of the GDPR is pretty strict, with people removing externally hosted resources (like Google Fonts and Facebook widgets) from their sites.
It’s in that context that user ekatarinal on the WordPress support forum for WP YouTube Lyte asked if the thumnails for the Lyte video’s could not be loaded locally. That way user information (IP-address -and if the user is logged in to Google a lot more- would not be available to Google/ YouTube unless and until the visitor clicked the play-button. Additional advantage; no extra dns-lookup, http connection or ssl/ tls negotiation, no short caching-headers, … so very likely to improve performance as well!
And that’s why WP YouTube Lyte 1.7.0 is in the works and it will have that option. In fact it’s already up on Github in a first incarnation (call it beta), so if you want to test you can download the zip-file here.
EDIT: Lyte 1.7.0 was released on April 28th, no need to go down that Github road.

Wildbirds & Peacedrums "There Is No Light" (official video)

 

Music from our Tube: At Les, 20 years later

20 years ago I was somewhat into techno and stuff, especially the left-of-center music (and DJ sets) guys like Carl Craig and Stacey Pullen released.
Times change and that jazz thing has caught on pretty big the last couple of years for me. And now there’s Japanese Jazz-maestro Toshio Matsuura covering Carl Craig’s “At Les”. How great is that, right!?

Toshio Matsuura Group - At Les