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

January 10, 2006 8:48 AM

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.

posted by caek to Technology (12 answers total)

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.
posted by frenetic at 9:34 AM on January 10, 2006

Best answer: Can you do, ie:

http://www.cosmicvariance.com/feed/?author=-6
posted by null terminated at 10:49 AM on January 10, 2006

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

http://cosmicvariance.com/feed/?author=5,6
posted by monju_bosatsu at 10:52 AM on January 10, 2006

Response by poster: /feed/?author=-x works. Thanks very much!
posted by caek at 10:56 AM on January 10, 2006

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...
posted by phearlez at 11:02 AM on January 10, 2006

null terminiated's URL works for me.
posted by mmascolino at 11:04 AM on January 10, 2006

http://www.cosmicvariance.com/feed/?author=1-4 seems to work too, as does http://www.cosmicvariance.com/feed/?author=1-2,4,6
posted by lukemeister at 11:07 AM on January 10, 2006

How do I exclude Cory's posts from boingboing?
posted by lukemeister at 11:08 AM on January 10, 2006

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).
posted by andrew cooke at 12:16 PM on January 10, 2006

Is there any way to do this with Movable Type blogs?
posted by amber_dale at 12:17 PM on January 10, 2006

lukemeister, you are looking for dialedin.us. it'll let you filter boingboing all sorts of ways.
posted by AaronRaphael at 3:14 PM on January 10, 2006

AaronRaphael: Yes!!! I never have to hear about Walt Disney World® again!
posted by lukemeister at 6:57 PM on January 10, 2006