(Credit: René Ramos)
I love YouTube. Hardly a day goes by that I don't have videos playing in the background while I work. And when I'm not working, I'll watch some of my favorite YouTubers, consult how-to videos for all sorts of DIY projects and recipes, and otherwise use the video sharing site for entertainment, education, and general time-wasting. And since a fair amount of my personal browsing is done on my phone, I've consumed plenty of YouTube Shorts.
But when I'm using a laptop or desktop, YouTube Shorts are kind of awful. In my browser, the video framing is always wrong, and cuts off part of the video. It's also difficult to navigate within a Short, because YouTube assumes you're not pausing and rewinding these bite-sized clips, just consuming them one after another. And it's a hassle trying to view comments on a Short, or see more videos from the channel. It's an all around hassle.
I just want these short clips presented in standard YouTube format, and since there's no indication that YouTube plans to release such a feature anytime soon, I decided to take matters into my own hands.
Here's how I used a free AI tool to make a custom browser bookmarklet that solves this problem for me.
Do Your Homework First
Some clever detective work (i.e., watching a few more videos and noticing the URLs) lets me see that standard YouTube videos and YouTube Shorts use a different URL structure. The address is different for Shorts, as seen below.
Standard YouTube URL:
Problem solved! The simple URL tweak does the job, and the bookmarklet makes it happen with a single mouse click. Easy, quick, and reusable.
Not only did it give me a solution I could use again and again, but I even learned a bit of JavaScript along the way.
You could do it right now. Give it a try!
Apply and Experiment
The point here is not just to provide you with a handy way to change the layout of YouTube videos (though the code is just up above, if you want to.) Instead, it's an experiment to see how ChatGPT makes technology more accessible and how it lets anyone, even someone with zero coding knowledge or experience, make a custom tool in minutes.
These sorts of quick code solutions are available to anyone using free tools like ChatGPT, but the fixes that are most helpful will be those that solve your own irritations.
Here are some other ideas for bookmarklets that I've made successfully, and that you could make using a similar process:
- Automatically format bibliographic citations of web pages
- Redirect to the Archive.org version of a webpage
- Remove YouTube video controls for clean screenshot images
With a little creativity, you can find problems in your own daily tasks that can be improved with these sorts of little automations. They don't have to be major technologies to have a big impact, and creating these bespoke tools has never been easier. Thanks to AI, you can do it without knowing any code at all.
How do you use ChatGPT to make your life easier? Share you best clever tricks in the comments below.