I’m Craig, from Pune, India, a FCC fan since a long while!
I love the course content on the website, but I love the Youtube channel even more. There is new content every week, including the latest technologies.
One thing I struggle with is focus and these excellent videos being on Youtube, where there are so many other distractions is a challenge I faced. So I thought, why not build a wrapper site on top of FCC Youtube videos, remove other distractions - FCC only. I built it with Claude in a day (see snapshots, I’m not allowed to post URLs). I then thought, could other people benefit from this? But the obvious question I ran into was “is this allowed?”. What are the content licenses involved? That brought me here, to ask the question openly.
Here’s the north star that I have in mind. What you see currently is only v1. In the future I can see this becoming a learning platform on top of FCC videos. By that I mean, user accounts, progress tracking/saving, learning paths (multiple videos), quizzes based on the content in the videos, code exams, certificates on completion, gamification (points on completion of videos, assignments) and a Duolingo style Knowledge graph. You can easily imagine so much being possible with the rich content here.
I see three choices here,
FCC explicitly forbids - in this I might carry on with it only as my personal project, not release it publicly.
FCC does not forbid it , but also doesn’t endorse it - in this case I might carry on with it as a public project #build-in-public and gauge popular demand for something like this.
FCC allows it and also endorses it - this is the scenario my fingers are crossed for! I would love to partner with FCC and anyone else who wants to contribute.
Here are some core values I have in mind.
The site stays free for anyone to view and use. No login needed by default.
Contributors are credited explicitly and very visibly, linking to their own pages.
Monetization via ads OR Freemium subscriptions OR Donations, undecided as of now, I’m open to any format.
I do know about the catalog, that was my first instinct. but the videos there don’t seem to be in sync with the videos on the freeCodeCamp.org - YouTube channel. Thanks for the email! Let me write to Quincy.
Actually as long as you’re just embedding freeCodeCamp’s videos this is probably fine.
@craigsds Please do not index these individual videos on Google, though, as we don’t want to confuse Google (we have announcement articles that also embed these videos). It’s fine to publicize your website though, and index it itself on Google - just not our individual videos if that makes sense.
Once you have it live let me know I’d like to try it
Thanks so much @QuincyLarson . That makes a lot of sense.
I’ve set the individual video pages to noindex and removed them from my sitemap, so Google won’t index them, only the site itself (the homepage and the catalog/list pages) is indexable. The videos are embedded (not re-hosted), and every page links back to freeCodeCamp and the channel.
I tried but can’t share the URL, it gets flagged for self-promotion. In any case you can see it in the previous snapshots.
I’m always open to collaborate with the team if there’s ever interest down the line. Thanks again for the awesomeness that is freecodecamp. I’ve benefited a lot from it personally.
I’ve managed to take this a little further - user accounts login and progress tracking.
I’m imagining v1 of progress tracking to be answering quiz questions after each chapter ends. These quiz questions are based on the content of that chapter.
This does require Youtube transcripts and I’ve run into the YouTube API ToS that says obtaining transcripts for videos I don’t own without express permission from the owner amounts to violation of terms of service.
I wanted to know if I have your permission for this? I’m open to a conversation too if you’d like to understand more.
Actually for now let me take that request back. It feels unearned and therefore wrong. I’ll try a different way of providing value without using the transcript.
Reach out to FCC directly — that’s probably your clearest path forward. These kinds of companies tend to respond pretty well when someone actually takes the time to ask permission rather than shipping first.
