An introduction to Yahoo! Pipes
Yahoo! isn't exactly one of my favourite companies out there, and it isn't hard to figure out why when you see how they've acquired and maintained technologies like Delicious and Flickr.
That being said, I have to say I'm a big fan of Yahoo! Pipes, and I haven't been able to find an alternative that's as good.
The name is derived from the Unix pipe where simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs.
Example
So here's a very simple example: let's say you have a specific RSS feed (in this example, the Guardian football RSS feed) you like - but you're only interested in very specific news (in this example, we only want content relating to Liverpool FC).
Go to Yahoo! Pipes and create a new pipe. Then add the RSS feed as input:
Click on the input-box and you should be able to see a preview of what the input is like:
Under the 'Operators' menu on the left, drag a 'filter' module into your pipe, add some rules and then connect the boxes together:
Click on the 'pipe output' box to see a preview of the new output:
Once you've saved your pipe, click on 'Run pipe' and get the output's RSS feed address:
I'm curious to see how others use Yahoo! Pipes - leave a comment if you think of something.
Use Google Reader to find out rough estimate of RSS subscribers
RSS has been becoming an increasingly popular part of Web-based applications and services. For example, Flickr provides an RSS for your photo-stream and even a user's favourites.
Many webmasters will know just how useful FeedBurner can be to get an accurate picture of their subscribers. Using FeedBurner means that you'll have to display a specific-to-you FeedBurner address so that it can gather statistics (e.g. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/RaminHossaini) You can't really use FeedBurner though for services like Flickr, because you have no real control of what the RSS-feed-address displayed to users on your Flickr page is (unless of course, you're advertising your RSS feed on a website of your own). The "hack" described below could help:
First, start out by subscribing to the RSS feed:
Next, click on the feed to view it then click on the "show details" link in the top-right corner:
You can then see how many people are using Google Reader to subscribe to the RSS feed:
This would obviously only be part of your subscriber-base. If you're happy with just approximating it, have a look at how much of a market share Google Reader has (I've looked at a couple of statistics and it seems to be roughly 60% at the moment) and use that to calculate the unknown number of subscribers.