Step #1 – Get That Ugly Pipe RSS Feed Address

First thing you need to do is get the RSS feed for your pipe you created. You can do that by going to the Yahoo! Pipes Web site, click “my pipes”, click on the name of your pipe, and then clicking on “Run this Pipe”. From there click on “Subscribe” and select the RSS output option (Get as RSS).

If you need an easier method, or you missed a click in there, take this URL and replace “yourpipeid” with the random spew of letters and numbers Yahoo gives you to identify your pipe.

Make sure you have that copied to your clipboard (in Windows higlight it all, right-click and select copy) so you can paste it in our next step.

Step #2 – Plug the Ugly Feed Address Into FeedBurner

Now that you have your ugly RSS feed in hand, point your browser towards FeedBurner.com. Paste your ugly RSS feed into the text box on FeedBurner’s Web site and click on the “Next” button. From there you will walk through the steps of creating a FeedBurner feed to replace your hideous pipe feed.

What does the final result look like? Well I created an ego feed of my own via Yahoo! Pipes, plugged it into FeedBurner and ended up with the Mega Mitch Feed.

Now from there, you can use FeedBurner to customize the look and feel of your feed and add all kinds of neat functionality to it.

First thing you need to do is point your browser towards Yahoo! Pipes and click on “Create a Pipe”. After doing that you will see a big confusing interface you can not make heads or tails from. Don’t worry. Just click on “Fetch Feed” and drag it over to your right (onto the grid).

Next you will want to click on the “+” graphic next to URL to add more feeds to the list. Click it once for every feed you would like to group together as one.

After that, you will need to sort your mega feed by date, so it looks like a regular ol’ RSS feed. To do that, click on “Operators” on the left sidebar and then drag and drop “Sort” onto the grid. Don’t worry if this looks messy, you don’t get any points for making it look nice yet.

On the box that says “Sort” you are going to want to select “Publication Date” on the drop down box. In the next drop down box you see (to the right of the first one) you need to select “descending” as the order you would like your feed to be displayed. That will cause all of the newest entries on your feed to be displayed at the top.

Next, you see that little circle under each of the boxes you have created? You need to connect them all together so they will work as one. Start with the “Feed Fetch” box. Drag the little circle down to down to the top of “Sort”. If you did it correctly you should see a blue line connecting the two now. Next click on the circle under “Sort” and connect it to the circle on top of “Pipe Output”.

Your almost done! In the upper right corner you should see a button that says “Publish”. Click that. A new box will come up and give you a lot of information to fill out about your feed. You can name it, put a description and some keywords. After doing that, click “Publish” at the bottom of that box.

Now click on the link that says “Back to My Pipes”. If everything was done correctly you should now see your newly created pipe listed there. Click on the name of your pipe and you can see a lot of information about it. The next thing you want to do is hit the “Run this Pipe” link.

Now you should see a Web page representation of your mega feed. Click on the link that says “Subscribe” and you will be given a list of options to choose from. There are a great number of ways you can keep up to date with this feed.

The one you pick is up to you. Here is the final product for the mega ego feed that I created! Neat, hu?

So now you have your own egotistical RSS feed to keep track of all of your different posts to all these different places. Even if you don’t have as many blogs or write at as many places as I do – you can still make use of this tool. You could combine your del.icio.us links and your Flickr feeds to keep track of your favorite links and photos. You could get the RSS feeds for all your friends’ blogs on MySpace and make one feed to track them all. The only limit is needing an RSS feed and your imagination.

+ Now Learn How To Plug That UGLY Feed Address Into FeedBurner!