Digital packrat that I am, I have been carrying my RSS feeds with me for years… surely over a decade. When Google Reader shut down, I exported my RSS feeds and moved them over to Feedly. Since then, I’ve tried successions of online services: Feedbin, Newsblur, and others. And some version of that original export was in there.

I decided to go hard on my RSS feed and start anew. Or at least seriously prune it. I exported my Newsblur subscription out of NetNewsWire and opened the exported OPML file in BBEdit. I went through line by line, section by section, eliminating subscriptions and even entire sections. I saved this file and imported everything back into NetNewsWire, selecting iCloud for the destination.

Presto: a lean and mean news feed, syncing between all my kit.

I don’t generally find desktop widgets on the Mac desktop to be useful; the desktop for me is a small collection of things I’m working on or about to file. But I did cobble these quick and easy Shortcuts, put them in a collection in the Shortcuts app, and display them on my Mac’s desktop for quick access.

One cool Shortcuts feature I never knew about is that they show up (and run) in both Spotlight and Launchbar. So you can really keep your fingers on the keyboard and get to what you need in OmniFocus, no matter what app you’re working in.

Om Mallik:

“Blogging is an individual and, I would say, selfish act — you do it because it is what you want to do for you.” Pure blogging is “blogging” because you have something to say. To me, that ability is what makes you a pure blogger. Any other explanation of blogging “is just the traditional idea of media,” meant for an audience and reach.

Pure Blogger

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

1. Suntory “The Premium Malts”: Aaron and I stopped at a sushi joint Friday night after a college visit, and I was uncharacteristically on the fence about which drink to have. They had a full bar with an old fashioned that sounded delicious… maybe that? They had a nice selection of sake, too, and I do enjoy sake with sushi. But they also had Japanese beer, in the usual varieties: Asahi, Saporo… and Suntory “premium malts?” I’d never heard of this one. I like Japanese beer for what it is, and for what it isn’t. It’s invariably clean, fresh, light, and balanced. It would go over well with most American beer drinkers, but unless you’re an unapologetic hophead who won’t taste anything without stratospheric IBUs, there’s plenty to like for snobs, too. I always get a Japanese variety at our favorite ramen joint in Rehoboth, Delaware. In any event, my curiosity was piqued by this new (to me) brew, so I tried it out. It is characteristically Japanese: balanced, fresh, and light on the palate, but decidedly more flavorful than the Asahi, Kirin, and Orion beers that I’v tried. I had two, at $11 a pop. Very good.

2. Habanero Relish: I’ve been making jalapeño relish for a few weeks now, chopping up jalapeños from Rhonda’s garden and packing them in a small mason jelly jar with a pinch of kosher salt and a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar. Last weekend I grabbed some habanero peppers to add to the relish and I really liked it. Much hotter but not intolerably so. I put this stuff on everything.

3. CardHop: One of the challenges of not using Google’s suite through your web browser is the lack of access to the email directory. At my previous job and current job, I often have to jump into Google Contacts to find an email address of a person that I didn’t have in my address book already (or hadn’t communicated with using my email application of choice, which is MailMate… although the limitations apply to Outlook and Apple’s Contacts app and pretty much everything else I’ve used). MailMate does allow you to scour emails you’ve already received and sent as autocomplete options, which is often good enough for me (but far short of ideal). I happened to open Cardhop earlier today and noticed that you can add directories to your accounts, which allows you to search your organization’s contact database. Cardhop is included with a Fantastical subscription, which I’ve long had and plan to continue to keep, because it’s a great product.

An oldie but goodie from John Gruber that I just discovered while looking for ways to soft-wrap text in BBEdit:

tell application "BBEdit"
    tell window 1
        if not (soft wrap text) then
            set soft wrap text to true
            set soft wrap mode to page guide
            set show page guide to true
        else if (soft wrap mode is page guide) then
            set soft wrap mode to window width
            set show page guide to false
        else
            set soft wrap text to false
        end if
    end tell
end tell

I use BBEdit all the time for editing text. LaunchBar fires the script for me.

This is a surprise.