Feedburner (http://feedburner.com
) lets users remix feeds and offers intermediary services based on feeds (such as tracking usage and advertising). It thus provides a useful illustration of the ways some users and companies are reusing and repackaging feeds.
The best way to understand Feedburner is to study the effect various options have on the feed you create with the service. Here’s what happened when I created a Feedburner feed:
I signed up for an account and went to http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/myfeeds
. I entered the URL of my weblog http://blog.mashupguide.net
, instead of the URL of a feed.
Feedburner prompted me to choose a feed from among the five feeds associated with my weblog via the feed autodiscovery mechanism (described earlier in this chapter). I chose the Mashup Guide Atom Feed (http://blog.mashupguide.net/feed/atom/
).
I accepted the defaults for the title (Mashup Guide
) and address (http://feeds.feedburner.com/MashupGuide
).
Feedburner has various features for customizing your feed:
You can customize the appearance of your feed in the browser. Feedburner attaches an XSLT style sheet to perform client-side transformation of the feed to HTML for a cleaner display of the feed in most browsers. For an example feed, you can explicitly see the HTML output using the W3C online XSLT service (http://www.w3.org/2005/08/online_xslt/
) to generate this:
You can get traffic statistics for the feeds you create.
You can add tags from the iTunes or Media RSS extensions to your feeds to support podcasts.
You can splice your feed with your links from various social-bookmarking sites (including del.icio.us) or your photos from various photo-sharing sites (such as Flickr).
You can georeference your feed by having Feedburner attach the latitude and longitude of a given location to it.
You can convert your feed to one of RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, Atom 0.3, or Atom 1.0.
I list these features here not to advertise Feedburner (it seems to do well enough for itself given its acquisition by Google) but rather to present it as a model so you can study the many ways in which others are remixing and mashing up feeds. In fact, Feedburner provides an API (http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/developers
), which suggests the high level of automation in place (or at least anticipated) for feeds.