Closing down Virtual University of Pakistan index
August 10, 2012, [MD]
I came across the Virtual University of Pakistan's YouTube collection in May 2010, and was amazed at the almost 6,000 videos in Urdu, but frustrated that it was so difficult to find courses, because all the videos were dumped into one big collection, with no individual course playlists, etc.
As a fun hack, I wrote a Ruby script that accessed the YouTube metadata programmatically and generated a very bare-bones index of the course videos, by course. I published this at http://reganmian.net/vu. Despite the simpleness of the page, it quickly became one of the most popular pages on my website, and brought in a large amount of visitors from Pakistan. During the last 2 years, the page has had more than 14,000 visits. But now the time has come to retire it.
The reason is that it is no longer needed. I first heard about VUTube through a comment on my blogpost, this seemed like a similar "external effort" to mine, though much more thorough and nicely designed. However, the real change is that the Virtual University themselves have created a beautiful and very user-friendly website listing all the courses, as well as much supplementary information.
I am looking forward to following the Virtual University of Pakistan, as it develops in the future!
Stian
Stian Håklev August 10, 2012 Toronto, Canada comments powered by Disqus