I’ve been thinking about the user interaction of subscribing to feeds and how, and at which point, to identify that a particular feed belongs to a particular person when you already subscribe to another feed coming from that person (i.e. subscribing to their delicious feed when you’re already subscribed to their blog).

I’d been trying to think of an easy way of typing in, or selecting the author’s real name, thus tying multiple feeds to a single individual (assuming that the feed doesn’t contain enough information to be able to deduce this already).

It took me a day or so of idling mulling in my spare time that it’s really solved by tagging and system-provided usernames. I am ‘pip’ on most of the systems I use; Paul Mison is ‘blech’. This is easily identifiable information from each feed, but if it’s not there, or different for any given service then it’s still quicker and easier to enter as a feed-level tag than the full name for a person.

The moral of the story is to look at the solutions you’re given rather than inventing new problems 🙂