I’m making a bold move in my social networking workflow, inspired by these two posts by @moonmehta: this one and this other one.

I have unfollowed everybody in Micro.blog (after backing up the follow list, just in case I need to go back (You can do this by Exporting Follows in your Fediverse details in the Accounts section). and then subscribed everybody back via RSS (I use NetNewsWire for this).

The https://micro.blog/posts/user format (no .json nor .xml extension, just the plain user name) lets you subscribe to both posts AND replies of a certain user. Every post they publish and every reply they send, regardless of the recipient (I even found out that this format https://micro.blog/posts/'mastodon user' lets me subscribe to any Mastodon account via RSS).

The idea is twofold. On one hand, I limit even more the addictive nature of every social network, even a one like Micro.blog, limited-by-design. My Micro.blog timeline will not show my follow’s posts anymore, so I won’t need to be checking the web or the app like I used to do with Twitter and I still do with Micro.blog. That should help me own even more the time I give to my digital stuff.

On the other hand, scrolling down the timeline wouldn’t guarantee that I’d read every post from my follows, and I’d miss many of them. Having them in NetNewsWire will assure that I can read every post and reply and I won’t miss my favorite people’s insights.

I have started subscribing to 75 RSS feeds. This might change. I might see that I want to receive updates from a smaller number of people. Or I might like the system and follow even more people this way. I have 3.750 unread posts right now, so the Mark All As Read feature is going to be very handy in the beginning, and probably down the road too.

Engaging with the posts and replies might be a bit cumbersome. When I see a post I want to reply to, NetNewsWire opens the original blog. If the blog has the “Comment on Micro.blog” feature, it’s easy to reply to. If not, it’s a bit more difficult. Replies are opened directly in Micro.blog, so that’s not an issue. I’ll see how it goes.

So here’s a new try in my blogging/social networking journey. I want to write more and scroll less; I want to engage in meaningful conversations and read everything from the people I like. Above all, I want to own the experience and the time.

And one added benefit: this RSS feed https://micro.blog/feeds/eumrz.json now gives me my posts and the replies I receive from other people. That’s very cool. Thanks to Jatan for the idea.

🚀 What are UUIDs and why might I need them? – The Eclectic Light Company

It’s easy to generate a UUID in Terminal: simply type

uuidgen

and that command tool will return a fresh UUID as its response, neatly formatted using the standard layout. There are also equivalent calls available to software through the UUID structure in the macOS Foundation API. You can use those to verify that UUIDs generated close together in time are actually very different indeed.

I don’t know what I need this for, nor whether I will ever remember I bookmarked it, but it looks cool and I have the feeling some day it might pay off to keep it. #geekery

🚀 Accents or repeat: how is your keyboard configured? – The Eclectic Light Company

Summary

• For key repeat: defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
  • For diacritics: defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true
  • TinkerTool for either.

I’m grateful to Mark for reminding me of this setting.

And I’m grateful to Howard for bringing it back so I can take note of it. #geekery

So I installed RayCast to try a DEVONthink plug-in that looked promising, and I uninstalled it after two minutes. It was quite meh. The plug-in, I mean, and how it searched and managed groups and files within DT. And overall, RayCast is not a match for the File/Folder handling of LaunchBar. Instant Sending, moving, copying, renaming, batch processing… are handled much more conveniently in LaunchBar. I did not bother to look into any other features of RayCast: I guess I’m still a die hard LaunchBar user. #geekery

I missed it because of DST, because in Europe we enter into DST a couple of weeks later than the US, so we’re still in winter time. But im not going to miss the next one, for sure.

Another interesting, thoughtful, and fun Micro.blog Analog Tools meetup this morning! 🖋️📓🗂️ We talked about hybrid analog/digital tools and processes, how friction can help slow thoughts down, and much more.

I think that the blogroll implementation for micro.blog’s Recommendations is lacking one thing. Since the recommended blogs accept an optional description, I would expect the description to show in the blogroll. I wanted to use that to explain why I think that each blog in the list is worth a visit.