Handy little tip to avoid unnecessary drill-down, plus a plug for an old Mac evergreen.

Excellent ALA article on use cases for non-nerds....I wish all clients were smart and patient enough to walk through this level of detail before they started choosing new drapes and doorknobs.

NetNewsWire is one my favorite Mac applications. It's a beautiful RSS/Atom reader with so many wonderful features that it's easy to lose one of it's smartest ones in the lights.

I've talked recently about the value of setting your email program's "autocheck" frequency to something more realistic than "every minute," as so many folks currently do. It's an easy way to minimize distraction, plus it encourages the smart habit of "ganging" email work into focused sprints of activity—rather than dashing away from whatever you're doing every minute or two like Pavlov's drooly puppy.

NetNewsWire has a setting that supports this same good habit in your site surfing habits. Under "Preferences > Downloading > Feeds", you can set "Refresh all subscriptions" to any of [Manual only | Every 30 Minutes | Every Hour | Every 4 Hours]. While the last one is optimal for server load etiquette and reduced distraction fu, I think you could be forgiven for wanting updates every hour. But what if you want even more granularity—to further minimize distractions from time sink "fun" sites? Easy.

Today’s gonna be a quickie since I can audibly hear a couple deadlines whooshing past me right this second.

How much do I love my readers? So much.

Mike Harris very kindly sent me a suggestion about having a look at Remind, a swell little Unix program for doing CLI stuff to give yourself, well, reminders. It’s really quite powerful, that.

Despite my initially flipping the bozo bit by asking for technical support about installing Remind, Mike responded with one of the most useful emails I’ve received in a year. So good, that I asked him to move a couple things around and turn it into a full-length guest feature for 43 Folders. So he did.

Many thanks, Mike. I'm still getting my head around a lot of this, but already see many uses for this. Fellow Unix noobs: this looks like a pretty good first project, eh?

Dan Dickinson posts a great, intermediate Quicksilver tutorial; how are you using Quicksilver?

Our usual Friday skip through the meadow of Merlin's marginally-productive brain.

Follow-up to the email productivity post. Short overview of how I process my inbox.

Wrote a little bagatelle on blogging for the Six Apart kids. Congrats to them and Mule for a beautiful re-launch.