In an effort to get back into coding and learn the YouTube API’s better I have put together a very simple site, www.whatslivenow.com. It simply checks the YouTube Live API every 15 minutes, saves the results to a MySQL database, and then displays the latest live events ranked by how many “Likes” they have had. This makes the chart a little less dynamic than I would have liked, but the viewCount parameter isn’t currently being populated, so my preference to rank based on what has the most current viewers isn’t possible.

It’s also a nice experiment with CSS and jQuery Mobile, using a template I found called Splitview. I had to make a number of changes to make it work for this example, but visually it looks pretty simple and is very functional across desktop, tablet and mobile devices. I will play around with the functionality over time, but for now I am happy that the experiment was a success. I think with the addition of some social media functionality it could be a nice second screen experience too. Please let me know what you think!