How to easily create an author-specific RSS feed with Feedburner



Contributing Writer
Photo: Burning Match Credit: Stephen Davies


The first week of featured posts on leaderswest.com has been phenomenal.  Every day I write between 60-75% of the content on the site, and without fail the most traffic goes to the featured author – a true testament to the caliber of writers that have agreed to contribute.  Even with all of the ramp up to becoming a multi-author site, technical issues have come up and I was able to solve a big one with Feedburner.

The impetus for this problem started with a great article by Dan Hebert, “How thoughtful social media strategy can influence people to buy.”  It was picked up as a feature on Social Media Today, yet it attributed the article to me and had no attribution to him at all (we were subsequently able to add a line at the beginning).  It became clear that in able to properly attribute content to their authors that I would have to create an author-specific RSS feed.

I Googled it and came up with a lot of answers.  Wordpress is supposed to have this function but I couldn’t get that to work, a lot of custom CSS exists that I could reverse engineer (which I absolutely did not want to do).  Before delving into the depths of CSS purgatory I tried Feedburner, and found it to be a very simple and effective solution.  (Feedburner is an RSS feed creator and analytics tool acquired by Google).

All that I had to do was click on the author’s name in the byline which brought up a page with only Dan’s contributions.   I put the link to the author-specific page into Feedburner and it gave me an option to create a feed for the entire site or one for the page.  I clicked on the page and it created a feed specific for Dan’s content on the site.  Of course the caveat to that is a boatload of work to do the downstream stuff like update six IFTTT channels for each contributor and submit individual feeds to syndicators is time-consuming, but totally worth it.

I experimented with a few other sites with mixed results.  You can create a feed like this on Mashable and Time, but not HuffPo or CNN – so it’s a useful tool for some sites but not all.  (I should mention that this site is a self-hosted WordPress site.)

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Jim Dougherty

Jim Dougherty

Writer and chief of miscellany at leaderswest.com

I aspire to give people something to think about rather than tell them what to do. My favorite Google Alert is “social media research,” I am increasingly compelled by Gen Z, and I appreciate good writers agnostic of where they write. At one time I was Kred’s 12th most influential social media blogger and Klout’s most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff. Transplant from Seattle living in Cincinnati. Haven’t entirely adopted the local sports teams yet.

Jim Dougherty

@jimdougherty

Writer about social media and tech at Leaders West, I also tweet as @leaderswest.

Facebook advertising strategy, the “no-bull****” approach. http://t.co/8FxCBv6MjA – 19 hours ago

Jim Dougherty

Jim Dougherty

  • http://webpressutah.com Sheila Atwood

    Excellent fix! I have seen this function in Feedburner but never used it, never thought about it.

  • http://leaderswest.com Jim Dougherty

    Thanks Sheila for reading and commenting! I figured this post was far down the long tail of interest, but since I hadn’t found it anywhere else I figured it would be worth a post. I’m glad it was useful to you! Cheers!

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