Comments on: How do I ignore one of a blog's authors?

Question: How do I ignore one of a blog's authors?

caek — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 08:48:51 -0800

Can I ignore one author's posts on a Wordpress blog, either by crafting RSS feeds or doing something smart with my client?

I follow Cosmic Variance with RSS. It has five authors. I am only interested in four of them, and would prefer not to see posts from the fifth. Their CMS is Wordpress and my client is NetNewsWire.

I understand Wordpress is written in PHP. Is it possible to craft a feed URL that ignores posts from an author? Failing that, is it possible to craft several feed URLs, one for each author?

Failing that, does anyone know how to get NNW to ignore posts by an author? Using a smart list, I've managed to create a smart subscription where Subscription Name is Cosmic Variance and Creator is not $AUTHOR. However, I have to maintain a regular Cosmic Variance subscription to do this, all of whose posts show up in my unread items.

By: frenetic

frenetic — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 09:34:29 -0800

I don't know of any way to exclude authors off the top of my head. But you can get the posts of particular authors like this:

http://www.cosmicvariance.com/feed/?author=6

And you can get the different author IDs by visiting the contributor pages linked on the right sidebar and checking out the 'Posts by [author]' link.

By: null terminated

null terminated — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 10:49:25 -0800

Can you do, ie:

http://www.cosmicvariance.com/feed/?author=-6

By: monju_bosatsu

monju_bosatsu — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 10:52:54 -0800

No, but you can do a comma separated list of authors, like so:

http://cosmicvariance.com/feed/?author=5,6

By: caek

caek — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 10:56:22 -0800

/feed/?author=-x works. Thanks very much!

By: phearlez

phearlez — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 11:02:32 -0800

All I can think of would require you to read the feed with Firefox, not NetNewsWire. There's a Greasemonkey plugin that excludes all of Xeni's posts from BoingBoing, presumably it could be hacked to do that to anyone...

By: mmascolino

mmascolino — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 11:04:09 -0800

null terminiated's URL works for me.

By: lukemeister

lukemeister — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 11:07:43 -0800

http://www.cosmicvariance.com/feed/?author=1-4 seems to work too, as does http://www.cosmicvariance.com/feed/?author=1-2,4,6

By: lukemeister

lukemeister — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 11:08:43 -0800

How do I exclude Cory's posts from boingboing?

By: andrew cooke

andrew cooke — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 12:16:55 -0800

More generally, you can use XSL. Just take an identity tranform and add a rule that matches items you don't want, but which does nothing.

Then you need to apply the XSL to the XML. I use Saxon, but thre's a pile of xsl engines out there.

Example here (self link, permalink).

By: amber_dale

amber_dale — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 12:17:00 -0800

Is there any way to do this with Movable Type blogs?

By: AaronRaphael

AaronRaphael — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 15:14:55 -0800

lukemeister, you are looking for dialedin.us. it'll let you filter boingboing all sorts of ways.

By: lukemeister

lukemeister — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 18:57:49 -0800

AaronRaphael: Yes!!! I never have to hear about Walt Disney World® again!

By: WCityMike

WCityMike — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 20:03:47 -0800

Plus, now that he's "quit his day job," we get to have even more reactionary, poorly thought out rants and egocentric self-defenses. Love his books. Hate his blogging.