Using a TODO List and Keyboard Macros to Guide RSS Feed Review

Yesterday in On Blogging and Online Neighborhoods. In that post I identified that I wanted to share my blog roll.

The Task at Hand

I started on that work last night and wanted to share a bit of the process.

1. Normalize my current feed.
2. Create a Todo oriented document.
3. Do the Todo.
4. Save my progress.

Normalize My Current Feed

I keep my blog-roll in an Org-Mode 📖 document; at ~/git/org/elfeed.org. (Sidenote: I used the elfeed-org package to store my feeds, which allows me allow me to annotate each feed. ) It was a bit unruly; several top-level headings and a smattering of tags.

What I wanted was a simple list of the URLs 📖 to the RSS feeds. That was relatively straight forward:

rg "^\*+\s+(http\S+)" ~/git/org/elfeed.org -r '** TODO $1' > ~/Desktop/normalized-rss-feed.org

The above Ripgrep 📖 command extracted the URLs as second level headings, with a status of Todo. Normally I would export these as checklists, but I knew I wanted to leverage Org-Mode ’s heading tags; because as I was reviewing each feed I wanted to categorize them. (Sidenote: The categories are useful for filtering my feed; if I’m searching for something. )

Create a Todo Oriented Document

With the file created at ~/Desktop/normalized-rss-feed.org, I prepended a custom Todo sequence: TODO(t) STARTED(s) | PUBLIC(p) PRIVATE(r) DROP(d). (Sidenote: See TODO Basics (The Org Manual) for more details. )

I envisioned the states as follows:

TODO

I still need to begin the work on this.

STARTED

I have opened the website and began assessing it.

PUBLIC

This is a feed that I will continue to subscribe to and share on my blog-roll.

PRIVATE

This is a feed that I will continue to subscribe to but will not share on my blog-roll.

DROP

This is a feed I will remove from my blog roll.

I added the STARTED to provide a placeholder for that moment when I begin looking at a website and could likely spend a few moments reading or jumping to other links.

I also added a first level headline above all of my second level headings. The [0/3] marker is a a tally of how many I’ve completed. (Sidenote: See Breaking Down Tasks (The Org Manual) for more details. )

Below is an example of the document before I began the work of reviewing each feed.

#+TODO: TODO(t) STARTED(s) | PUBLIC(p) PRIVATE(r) DROP(d)

* Feeds [0/3]
** TODO http://ajroach42.com/feed.xml
** TODO http://decafbad.net/feed
** TODO http://evrl.com/feed.xml

The above document gave me a checklist of work to move through.

Do the TODO

With a checklist in hand, I thought about the steps I would take to open each page. With a game plan in mind, positioned my cursor at the beginning of the line of the first feed (e.g. ** TODO http://ajroach42.com/feed.xml).

What I wanted to do was to set the line to STARTED (e.g. “start” the task) and open the homepage for that feed.

Knowing that I would be doing this a lot, I started recording a macro and typed the following keys:

C-a C-a

Ensure we are at the beginning of the line; a good pre-amble for recorded macros.

C-c C-t s

Invoke org-todo and mark the headline as STARTED.

s-f / / <return>

Move the cursor to just after the first encountered //. We’re at the beginning of the host name.

M-b

Goto the beginning of the word, we’re not at the http point of the string.

C-SPC

Set the mark (e.g. begin the selecting text)

s-f / / <return> s-f / <return>

We are now highlighting the scheme and host name (e.g. http://decafbad.net/).

s-c

Copy the highlighted text; the homepage of the feed.

M-x e w w <return>

Invoke the eww command; the web browser within Emacs 📖 .

s-v <return>

Paste the copied homepage of the feed as the URL to visit.

Once I was done reviewing I would manually return to the STARTED item and again set it’s status to either PUBLIC, PRIVATE, or DROP. In setting the status the counter would increment.

Save My Progress

Because I was working from a checklist, this was a task that I could set down and pick up as I found moments in my workday.

Knowing this, I added a section to the document; namely the recorded macro exported:

(defalias 'review-elfeed
     (kmacro "C-a C-a C-c C-t s s-f / / <return> M-b C-SPC s-f / / <return> s-f / <return> s-c M-x e w w <return> s-v <return>"))

Now, when I come back to the document I can evaluate the block of text and have access to an a review-elfeed command.

Conclusion

This is the second time this week that I’ve used something similar to the above strategy; namely creating a checklist of Todo items; each of which require decisions and routing to different status.

The first time involved building a checklist of Github issues, gathering up all of the pull requests that went into resolving those issues, then tracking down each commit for those pull requests.

The second time, the one I write about in this post, was simpler to explain and more accessible to a general audience.

I appreciate the automation of Emacs ; it took awhile for me to use keyboard macros, but now I’m spoiled. I write them by first pushing the record button F3 and then replay them by pressing F4; and when I want to run them 100 times, I just type Ctrl 1 0 0 F4.

This is one reason I am trying to bring more and more of my computering to Emacs ; because the utilities I have available for writing, reading, and navigating text. (Sidenote: See Emacs Turbo-Charges My Writing. )

When I first started recording keyboard macros, I tried to type as I normally would. But, what I found is that if I slow down, just a bit, I have a better chance of recording the correct sequence. (Sidenote: If I need to edit it, I can do that with edit-kbd-macro. )

For those reading along, I hope this was helpful; and as always please feel free to reach out to me.