Open Letter to Feedburner
I’m pretty sure I’ve been told that Feedburner is working on the ability to dynamically add feeds to their service, but I haven’t seen anything concrete. I can’t tell you how many times I wished this feature was available. There are limitless applications for this and it could even streamline non-dynamically generated feed creation. If anyone knows of a service that can do this, I may move my 500+ feeds off of Feedburner just to be able to create hosted feeds on the fly.
For example, most blog sites (and many traditional sites) have tag clouds–user-generated “topics” for content. Most content management tools automatically create a feed for tag landing pages, but there is currently no efficient way to add these dynamically generated feeds to my Feedburner account. Off the top of my head I can think of at least another dozen applications for a tool like this.
Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but this feature seems simple enough. As a feed owner, I can setup a predefined pattern of Feedburner URLs (http://feeds.feedburner.com/tompimental/custom/%%ID%%) and associate them with a predefined pattern of source RSS feeds (http://www.tompimental.com/custom/%%ID%%) on my site. At the same time, I setup my preferences for this type of dynamic feed. All of my dynamically created feeds will call Feedburner with that predefined pattern. When Feedburner receives a request for a non-existent feed, it grabs the title in the source feed, applies the predefined preferences and displays the new feed.
Am I missing something?
