How to Read Blog Articles Written Only By Your Favorite Bloggers

How to Read Blog Articles Written Only By Your Favorite Bloggers

best-bloggers TechCrunch, BoingBoing, PaidContent, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, AllThingsD.. these are definitely some of the best technology / media blogs on the planet. They are written by an army of qualified writers who keep churning out great articles at an amazing pace.

For instance, on a typical work day, more than a dozen new stories are published on TechCrunch - some are written by Michael Arrington himself while the rest by his team. This number is much higher if you follow gadget blogs like Engadget or Gizmodo.

While the content is good, a problem is that not all of us have the luxury (or time) to digest information at that pace. Hence we often see comments that say - "I stopped reading Blog X because the frequency of updates was very high."

So how do you deal with this problem without unsubscribing from any of your favorite blogs ? Well, a simple solution is to pick few favorite bloggers from a multiple author blog and just follow posts written by them. (Related: "How to Reduce RSS Stress In Your Life")

Let’s say you want to read Mashable but only articles that are authored by Pete Cashmore himself. Here’s how you can achieve this (total time taken: 1 minute):

1. Open Yahoo! Pipes and drag the "Fetch Feed" module onto the drawing canvas.

2. Type the URL of the Mashable blog feed in the input box and hit the tab key (see screenshot).

yahoo-pipes-tutorial

3. From the Operators group, drag-n-drop the Filter module onto the canvas. Type item.dc:creator in the rules box and set the value as Pete Cashmore.

You can add more authors to the same filter by click the plus icon near Rules. In same feeds, you may have to select item.author instead of item.dc:creator - don’t worry, these are always listed in the drop-down.

filter-rss-feeds

4. We are almost done. Connect Fetch Feed pipe to Filter and then the Filter to the Pipe Output module.

Save the pipe, give it a nice memorable name and subscribe to the new feed in your favorite RSS reader or via email.

yahoo-pipes-rss-feed

Here are two sample Yahoo Pipes - (i) ReadWriteWeb (shows stuff written by either Richard MacManus or Marshall Kirkpatric) and (ii) TechCrunch (will syndicate posts authored by Mike Arrington only).

And do check out this Yahoo! Pipes Video Tutorial on merging multiple FeedBurner feeds into one. This article is inspired by Ed Kohler.