Four nice changes to Pipes this week.

First, ever wanted to share your Pipe but not your username, password or application ID? Now you can! Pipes now supports “private” fields in two new modules, the private input module and the private string module. Private fields are not visible to anyone but the Pipe creator, and are not copied if the Pipe is cloned. If a Pipe user doesn’t provide a value for a private input field, then any “default” value provided by the Pipe creator continues to be used - so your Pipes will run for anyone but only you can see the private values.

Secondly, in addition to the new private modules we’ve added a “source” view for HTML formatted data in the editor’s debugger. So now those filters and regexes get a lot easier to write when you can easily browse the source directly:

Thirdly, we’ve enabled direct editing for the field selection drop down controls in the editor. This doesn’t sounds like a big deal until you realize you can now add array offsets to dig down into sub-arrays in the data, in any module (not just regex), or work on fields that aren’t currently flowing through the Pipe. For example, want to get at the first link in your raw ATOM feed? Rather than referring to the field as item.link.href, just type item.link.0.href

Finally, the Google feed issues we started experiencing last week should now be thing of the past. No more captchas. Yay!

This week we’ve got three more updates to our site: Give you and your Pipes easy to read URLs; RSS and JSON output from most pages; and quick links to various social bookmarking sites.

First, are you fed up with those impossible to remember Pipe URLs? We certainly were, so now we’ve implemented a way for you to create nice human readable (and memorable!) URLs for your Pipe page, and all of your Pipes. It’s as simple as two clicks for yourself - find the web path URL at the top of your “My Pipes” page, click “edit”, choose a nice name for yourself, and hit “Save”. Done!

Once you’ve got a nice name, its time to move on to your Pipes. Again, it’s as easy as two clicks. Go to your Pipe’s page, press “edit” next to the web path shown just above the actions, type in the nice name for the Pipe, and press “Save”.

Secondly, wherever you can find a list of Pipes on our site, such as our search pages or anyones “My Pipes” page, you can now get that same list as JSON or RSS. So now you can keep up to date with Pipes being created by other great developers, or mash them up in Pipes!

Finally, once you find a Pipe you find interesting, why not share it with others outside of your fellow developers? Just to left of each Pipe’s run page you can find quick links to add the Pipe into various social bookmarking sites.