Gaia Tools And The YouTube Redirect

The YouTube Redirect service is broken

Hey Gaia Tools users, we have some unfortunate news about the YouTube Redirect service. About two years ago Google deprecated their Flash API. This was fine for a while, deprecated didn't mean it was going away immediately. However, as of roughly three or four weeks ago Google has completely dropped their Flash API.

How does this cause the YouTube Redirect service to not work? Gaia's profiles use the now fully removed Flash API. As such, the YouTube Redirect redirected to the Flash API. No more Flash API, no more working redirect.

You might be asking why do normal YouTube video URLs work. The answer to that is that because YouTube is so big, most browsers now implement a converter to the new API when a standard YouTube URL is requested. However, this is not the case for Gaia Tools' URLs. :( When Gaia updates the profile we can update the redirect URL. We know this is a huge inconvience to many, the YouTube redirect service was gaining real traction.

The Future of Gaia Tools

That said, let's have a small chat about what's in store for Gaia Tools. Right now we are in the works of updating our entire structure. This is a massive shift, but a necessary one to keep the site growing. We are shifting the framework the site was built on because the existing framework, while we love it, has outlived its usefulness. We were forced to start patching together various libraries. So instead of doing that, I decided that we needed a new framework. One that has a lot of what we were starting to patch together built-in and one that has fairly good support, but that meets our needs in terms of functionality and structure.
For the most part, the front end won't have much noticable impact. However, we can implement some new goodies easier with the new framework.