This is a great idea. I’ll share my similar RSS hack: I’ve replaced my RSS reader with a simple list of sites I’d like to keep reading. No more subscriptions!

It used to be that I’d fire up NetNewsWire and poof!—thirty minutes or even an hour would slip away. Now I keep a big list of sites in a text file, and when I feel like catching up on the web, I look through the list, visit a site or two, and browse. I ‘subscribe’ to a site by appending it to the file with QuickSilver. It’s just like your magazine subscription, Merlin: I now only read a site when the mood strikes, rather than when new content is posted, and instead of feeling like another pile to deal with the web is a little more under my own control. Much simpler, much faster, much smaller commitment of time and mental space.

I got the idea for this when, for some reason, NNW stopped downloading feeds and became just a list of bookmarks. I still haven’t bothered troubleshooting it because I find this method so much more manageable!