I just wrote a post on creating a feed using YQL and Pipes. Now that you’ve got a shiny new feed, what to do with it? Well, my suggestion is to run it through a service like FeedBurner, here are three reasons why:
Cleaner URL
What you may have noticed if you read that post is the not-so-pretty URL that Pipes generates. I mean don’t get me wrong, Pipes is great but wouldn’t it be great to have a URL that looked like this,
http://pipes.yahoo.com/feeds/myImaginaryFeed
instead of this?
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=05ed54b00bf80cc43160ee19d6b18e02&_render=rss
Well, you’re in luck because running a feed through FeedBurner will give you a nice URL like this,
http://feeds.feedburner.com/myImaginaryFeed
Usage Stats
But wait, there’s more! (Sorry, I couldn’t help it.) FeedBurner’s main purpose as a service isn’t really to give you cleaner URLs, it’s to “analyze, optimize, publicize,” and “monetize” your feed. One of the great things about using FeedBurner is that any usage of a feed gets logged giving you usage stats, something darn near impossible otherwise. (Unless of course you’re a server-side code ninja and love writing code for this sort of thing, but then you’re not the target audience for this post anyway so go code something already will ya?)
Abstraction
Finally, using FeedBurner gives you the added advantage of being able to provide a URL for your feed that never changes. Since your actual feed is plugged into FeedBurner and you’re providing your readers with the URL created by the service rather than your own, you can easily change your source feed URL without losing any readers. They’ll always be plugged into your FeedBurner feed no matter what the source is. Instant feed URL abstraction!
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