Have you ever seen the famous message on YouTube: “This video has been removed by the user.”, but what if you’re trying to grab that video via the Zend_Gdata_YouTube?

That can happen when you’re reading the feed for a channel or a user’s list of videos. In the feed everything’s OK – once the video is uploaded it appears into the feed. After that the user removes the video and visiting the link from the feed you’ll get the message above.

Actually what happens when you try to read this “video entry” within a Zend Framework’s application. There must be some way to catch this message?

Trying to Catch

The answer is pretty simple! Zend_Gdata_YouTube’s throwing an exception and it can be easily cached. Here’s some source code:

$apiKey = 'your_api_key';
$client = new Zend_Http_Client();
$gdata = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube($client, 'my-app', null, $apiKey);
try {
       $gdata->getVideoEntry($video_id);
} catch(Zend_Gdata_App_Exception $e) {
       echo $e->getMessage();
}

The task is to read the entire Gdata from a YouTube’s channel. It may sound easy, but as you may know Gdata is based on the Atom publishing protocol, and it naturally gives you only the latest few items.

Of course Zend Framework has a large set of classes dealing with Google’s Gdata services, one of them is the Zend_Gdata_YouTube.

It gives you the power to iterate/paginate over the entire set of YouTube user’s/channel’s videos. In that example let’s assume you have a protected function doing the reading of a single portion:

protected function _process(Zend_Gdata_YouTube_VideoFeed $videoFeed)
{

    /* @var $entry Zend_Gdata_YouTube_VideoEntry */
    foreach ($videoFeed as $entry) {
        /* @var $published Zend_Gdata_App_Extension_Published */
        $published = $entry->getPublished();
        $thumbnails = $entry->getVideoThumbnails();

        // set date format
        $date = new Zend_Date($published->getText());

        // array
        $tags = $entry->getVideoTags();

        $data['title'] = $entry->getVideoTitle();
        $data['description'] = $entry->getVideoDescription();
        $data['date'] = $date->get('Y-MM-d hh:mm:ss');
        $data['thumb'] = @$thumbnails[3]['url'];
        $data['id'] = $entry->getVideoId();
        $data['flash_player'] = $entry->getFlashPlayerUrl();
        $data['tags'] = implode(',', $tags) . ', ' . $entry->getVideoCategory();
        // do whatever you want with the data
    }

}

The only thing left is to iterate over the “pages” of the feed. This can be done with getNextFeed() method.

public function readRssAction()
{
    $userId = 'some_user';
    $client = new Zend_Http_Client();
    $gdata = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube($client, 'my-app', null, $this->_apiKey);
    $videoFeed = $gdata->getUserUploads($userId);

    // save the last items
    $this->_process($videoFeed);

    try {
        while ($videoFeed = $videoFeed->getNextFeed()) {
            $this->_process($videoFeed);
        }
    } catch (Zend_Gdata_App_Exception $e) {
        echo $e->getMessage();
    }
}

You’ll get an exception when there is no more feeds to process!

To combine all this into a single controller and to complete the code here’s the entire source:

class YoutubeController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
    protected $_apiKey = 'your_api_key_goes_here';

    protected function _process(Zend_Gdata_YouTube_VideoFeed $videoFeed)
    {

        /* @var $entry Zend_Gdata_YouTube_VideoEntry */
        foreach ($videoFeed as $entry) {
            /* @var $published Zend_Gdata_App_Extension_Published */
            $published = $entry->getPublished();
            $thumbnails = $entry->getVideoThumbnails();

            // set date format
            $date = new Zend_Date($published->getText());

            // array
            $tags = $entry->getVideoTags();

            $data['title'] = $entry->getVideoTitle();
            $data['description'] = $entry->getVideoDescription();
            $data['date'] = $date->get('Y-MM-d hh:mm:ss');
            $data['thumb'] = @$thumbnails[3]['url'];
            $data['id'] = $entry->getVideoId();
            $data['flash_player'] = $entry->getFlashPlayerUrl();
            $data['tags'] = implode(',', $tags) . ', ' . $entry->getVideoCategory();
            // do whatever you want with the data
        }
    }

    public function readRssAction()
    {
        $userId = 'some_user';
        $client = new Zend_Http_Client();
        $gdata = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube($client, 'my-app', null, $this->_apiKey);
        $videoFeed = $gdata->getUserUploads($userId);

        // save the last items
        $this->_process($videoFeed);

        try {
            while ($videoFeed = $videoFeed->getNextFeed()) {
                $this->_process($videoFeed);
            }
        } catch (Zend_Gdata_App_Exception $e) {
            echo $e->getMessage();
        }
    }
}

Note: here you’ve to substitute the API key with the one you’ve for your development.

This extension as expected gives the Zend Framework the possibility to implement OpenId protocol. The problem is that the current version 1.9.6 does not work correctly with Google accounts.

The solution

can be found on one of the best resource sites – stackoverflow. You can simply follow the two comments to this post with no fear that this will work. It’s tested already.

Everyone dealing with Google Adsense knows how it looks like as JavaScript code. When you register, apply and receive the code chunk, you receive actually an inline chunk of js describing the width and height of the code and the key, uniquely identifying the page ad and an included javascript file.

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-9858850710257888";
/* 250x250, google ad 09-5-19 */
google_ad_slot = "0062396170";
google_ad_width = 250;
google_ad_height = 250;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.co/...">
</script>

Inline scripts and their behavior

The problem with the page load is that inline scripts included somewhere in the page, the case with adsense is just like that, blocks every page load until the script is executed. Of course when you’ve two or three ads somewhere in your page that causes huge delay of page load. Sometimes that may delay the page twice as much as if there were no ads from Google.

The workaround

The simple workaround is to place your ads <script> inline, included or both in a separate .html file and to include it as <iframe>. Such a solution gives the page the ability of render before the iframe is executed and the page load event is fired in an early stage.

<iframe src=”/path_to_the_banner.html”></iframe>