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comment by Complexity
Complexity  ·  4230 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Following authors?

Would you automate the author field by querying HTML Meta tags and/or REL=AUTHOR markup?





mk  ·  4230 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I was thinking about that. I wonder how many publications conform to something scrapeable. It's definitely worth trying.

Complexity  ·  4230 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Could run a quick scrape on the top 100 URLs posted on Hubski to see if they have META AUTHOR or REL=AUTHOR tags. Lower down in relevance is span class="author". HTML5 has ADDRESS. Google are suggesting a 'by <name>' somewhere in text on the page but that would be more tricky.

mk  ·  4230 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah, I'll try it out. I think I will avoid anything clever. If the author was obviously indicated, it could autofill, otherwise it should just fail gracefully and leave it blank.