More ‘exactly what it says on the tin’
A couple weeks ago, I had to renumber some Hunt: Showdown videos in a playlist:
Well, now I have another issue. When we started playing Hunt: Showdown, I was publishing the videos a couple a day on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Putting them all out at once is a bit of a crass move as it floods subscribers with notifications, so spreading then out is the Done Thing.1
However we’re now above 150 videos, and even after adding weekends to the schedule that still takes us up to, umm, May.
What I’d like to do is go back and redo the schedule so that all pending videos use Saturdays and Sundays, and maybe think about doing three or four per day, which would bring us down to about 8/6 weeks’ worth. That is still a lot, quite frankly, but pushing up the frequency further would be detrimental.
Changing the scheduled publish date would be even more painful than renumbering because it requires more clicks, I’d have to keep track and figure out when the next one was supposed to go out, and there are more to do (120-odd).
So back to python! I have already written a schedule-determiner for automating the generation of the pre-upload json template, so I can reuse — read: from genjson import next_scheduled_date — that for this task.
The filtering logic is straightforward: ignore anything not a Hunt video, skip anything before a defined start date (ie videos already published). From there change the current ‘scheduled’ date for the next one from the new schedule.
For the current set of scheduled videos that are not already published, the schedule of 3 videos each 5 days (15 per week) gives:
Current date: 2020-04-06 17:30New date : 2020-03-09 20:00
So we’ve saved a month! Plus the pending videos (~40) will be done in two and a half weeks instead of four.
From here it’s straightforward to rewrite the scheduled field and use shoogle as before to change the dates, this time setting publishAt under status. Note that privacyStatus needs to be explicitly set to private, even if it is already set! This avoids a “400 The request metadata specifies an invalid scheduled publishing time” error.
Another thing done quickly with python!
1: On the note of ‘Done Things’, the thing to do would be to upload fewer videos in the first place.
I’ve considered that, and if a video is truly mundane and missable, I will omit it. But as well as being fun/interesting videos of individual rounds, the playlist should serve as a demonstration of our progress as players. The Dead by Daylight playlist does this: we start with no idea what’s going on or how to play properly, and by the final video — somewhere north of 300 — we are pretty competent.