Yahoo Pipes multiple author filter?

March 9, 2007 12:24 PM

When Yahoo Pipes first came out, there was some muttering about how this would be handy for creating a feed for an individual author on a multi-author blog w/o feeds by author? But I can't seem to find anyone who's done it, or successfully do so myself. Any Pipes gurus on AskMe?

The three author filters I'd specifically like to create are:

• TNR's The Plank: all authors EXCEPT James Kirchick
• AOL Sportsblog: ONLY posts authored by mjd
• Reason's Hit & Run: all authors EXCEPT David Weigel

One problem seems to be that there isn't an author tag on these-posts on The Plank, for example, just have the author's name as the last line of the post. But maybe I'm missing something.

posted by Chrysostom to computers & internet (8 comments total)

I've set one up with Kos's posts on Daily Kos. There's no magic bullet, at least in my own humble opinion ... best suggestion I've got for you is to actually look at the source of the feed -- the raw code -- and see what in there identifies the author.
posted by WCityMike at 12:37 PM on March 9, 2007

Here's one for Reason without Weigel

You can have multiple filters in a pipe, and make the filters exclude words in a certain item, as well as include.

As far as the plank, there may be no way to filter it totally. You could filter his name out of the description, but it would also filter it anytime someone discussed him.
posted by zabuni at 2:07 PM on March 9, 2007

Not entirely sure who MJD is on the AOL Sportsblog site, but if you click on an author's name beneath a post it'll take you to the author-specific page, each of which has its own feed. Simpler than using a Pipe, probably (though you can also use the dc:creator field as a filter on that feed in Pipes & filter for the ones that match whoever you're looking for).
posted by zempf at 2:21 PM on March 9, 2007

Pipes seems to be kind of buggy with Safari, maybe that's where you are having difficulty. Here's a rough and ready version of The Plank without any of Kirchick's posts:
link
posted by roofus at 3:30 PM on March 9, 2007

Apparently Chrysostom, you are a "douchebag."

(I really wanted this too, I mostly stopped reading H&R because of Weigel)
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 11:21 PM on March 9, 2007

Unless I'm missing something, while clicking on an author's name in AOL Sportsblogs takes you to an author page, that's not what the feed on the page is.

If you click on mjd, for example, you go to nfl.aolsportsblog.com/bloggers/mjd/. The feed from that page is nfl.aolsportsblog.com/rss.xml, which is the feed for ALL NFL writers.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:21 AM on March 10, 2007

Ah, you're right. In that case, here's a pipe that'll filter for just MJD's posts.
posted by zempf at 7:34 AM on March 12, 2007

Yeah, I had just done that. So, the upshot was that there were author tags for H&R and AOL, I had just idiotically missed them.

There really isn't an author tag for TNR, though. I used a semi-workaround by excluding posts with the text of the author's name. What I don't like about that is that it would also exclude any posts by other folks who mention that name. The sign off style is "--name", which would allow me to beat that, but for some reason, Pipes chokes on the dashes.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:00 AM on March 14, 2007