Identifying authors in feeds

I have been doing my blog reading and writing primarily with Net News Wire for my reading and Ecto for my writing. A simply copy paste will paste html which is a very good start for a blog post. The biggest problem is the multi-author blogs. I bugged Boing Boing about it, and they put the name of the author in the text, even though it was already in their creator tag. This makes it much easier for me because the name of the author is in the html when I copy from Net News Wire. So Brent, and other news reader developers... I have a feature request if you haven't done it already. Can you please figure out an easy way to allow me to copy the name of the author and view the name of the author in the post? Also, for people working on syndication formats, keep in mind that in the case of group blogs, the author is important and I think some of the templates don't automatically add the authors.

6 Comments

01. Jason D- - Aug 23, 2004 - 09:14

I had to bug Tucows to get authors added to their feeds but it's there finally. I'm still waiting for them to add authors to the backup files they generate. been waiting over a month on that one I think. I run a bunch of multiauthor blogs and trying to export with no author info is just silly. Anyway I agree about the author thing. There should be a way to get that info out. I love posting to ecto from safari since you can do it with a service. It's not nearly as smooth from NNW. And the services don't work at all with Ecto 2 yet. Oh well.

02. Adriaan - Aug 23, 2004 - 09:33

Jason, the services work with ecto2. Make sure you logged back out and in, and make sure no old ecto copy is around.

03. Dan Dickinson - Aug 23, 2004 - 12:11

It should be noted that a small portion of the problem is that, officially, the RSS 2.0 spec requires the author field to contain the author's email address.

What a fun dilemma - expose yourself for spam harvesting, or have nonconforming RSS.

04. Phil Wolff - Aug 23, 2004 - 15:58

I've seen a few feeds that have a link to comments in the body of the post too. Very useful and I'm much more likely to participate in the conversational thread if it's there.

05. Brent Simmons - Aug 25, 2004 - 04:28

Thanks, good thinking. In NetNewsWire 2.0 (which will be a free upgrade) the description will display the author's name, and there will be a command for copying it.

06. Joi Ito - Aug 25, 2004 - 06:29

Phil, that's a good idea.

Groovy Brent. When does 2.0 come out?

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