I have a feature on the left column of this site titled "Birmingham News", which is meant to provide links to stories I have written for the Birmingham Post and Mail. It never really worked, because there was no RSS feed for my stories. My attempts to create a feed using Yahoo Pipes were unsuccessful (and Pipes, although incredibly useful when it works, is not always reliable in my experience).

So thank you Google News for coming to the rescue. Their author search feature allows you to create an RSS feed for stories written by any given author, so that I can isolate my own stories at last.

I thought this may be of interest to others, because you can of course do the same with any writer whose articles appear in Google News.

For example, I am a fan of Matthew Parris. He has his own page on the Times Online website, here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/

But there is no RSS feed specifically for his work, provided by the Times. At least, if it exists, it is well hidden and I could not find it.

But you can easily create your own feed from Google News. Here is the URL:

http://news.google.co.uk/news/search?aq=f&um=1&cf=all&ned=uk&hl=en&q=author%3A%22matthew+parris%22

To generate an RSS feed for any author, go to Google News:

http://news.google.co.uk/

Enter as your search term (taking Matthew Parris as an example):

Author:"Matthew Parris"

You should get a list of articles written by the author you have chosen. And on the left will be some options, including "sorted by date" and "sorted by relevance". I don't know what relevance means in this context, and personally I suggest clicking on "sorted by date" to ensure the feed gives you the latest articles as they go online.

Then you can either click on the RSS symbol somewhere near the top of your browser (it will be an orange symbol of some kind, and it will look a bit different depending on which browser you use), or simply scroll to the bottom of the page where there is an "RSS" link.

Click that link, and there you go.