The Huffington Post is a fantastic source of news and opinion from a (pretty much) progressive point of view.
Something cool and unique that HuffPo has is their bloggers. Unlike a typical paper or online publication which has 5-20 columnists, or a big community website like TPM or DK where anyone can sign up, Huffington Post is unique in that they hand-pick their columnists (bloggers), but there are a lot of them. So you have this pool of something like 1000 interesting people from various disciplines, blogging freely in one place.
However, their publishing system has a big problem: there is no per-author RSS or Atom feed! There is only a feed for ALL bloggers. If you like a particular author, the only way to follow their work is to sign up for email updates.
There is a way to work around this using filters on your news reader. Here is how to do that with NetNewWire.
First, you have to subscribe to the big feed of all bloggers (from here on known as The Big Feed). I put this in a folder called “filtered”, so I’ll remind myself to never “mark all as read” in that folder. (As you can see, Salon editorials have this same no-per-author-feed problem.)
Next, click the “gear” at the bottom of your feed list, and create a new Smart List. We are going to configure it with two criteria.
- The feed that the post must be from. This is a little unintuitive — it refers to any other feed that you are following — this is why we had to first subscribe to The Big Feed up above. To be clear: if you are not following the feed in this field elsewhere, then NNW will not pull down those posts. I’m kind of stating the obvious here, but this is something that bugs me about NNW — I wish there was a way to create a filtered feed all in one place, instead of forcing all the logic into a meta Smart List. Although to be fair, the Smart Lists are actually quite handy and full-featured. But come on man, it’s 2008, do I really need to be blogging about meta work-arounds like this? Okay, moving on…
- The “creator” (author) of the blog post. I use “contains” instead of “is” just in case the author changes the presentation of their name — adds a middle initial, “Dr.”, et cetera.
Here’s how it should look (using the brilliant and hilarious Chris Kelley as an example). Note that the field for the feed is too short to show anything past the http://, and that it’s impossible to make that window bigger to compensate for this problem. 2008, people!
That’s it! You can treat the Smart List exactly like a regular feed. The only thing you have to watch out for, is to not mark any posts as read in your “filtered” folder (unless all your Smart Lists don’t have any unread posts).
