NetNewsWire was one of the first, if not the first, Mac OS X apps that I bought for my first Mac, an iBook G3. Indulge me some nostalgia for a moment.

NetNewsWire 2.0, was three whole Mac-assed applications:

  • A feed reader we all came to love, miss, and then love again
  • A blog editor, later spun off into MarsEdit and still a thing you and I can buy today
  • An outliner, lost to time, AFAIK

I think this design came about because the author, Brent Simmons, had worked on Radio, one of the first blogging apps. And it was a feed reader and blog editor, all built on a programming environment built on top of an outliner.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were a pretty good time for bootstrapped environments! And, generally not doing things some specific way because that was the shortest road to the hyper-growth treadmill.

NetNewsWire 2.0

I mention this because I’m rediscovering a blogging workflow and realizing it’s a lot like what the NNW of old gestured at. Consider Austin Kleon and Matt Webb. They’re both long-time RSS fans, opinionated but not over-the-top note-takers, and they’re great writers on the web. Clearly, they’ve got something figured out. They both read websites via NNW, throw the good stuff into their notes (outlines), and then mix the good stuff together into a blog editor and hit publish.

To stand on their shoulders a bit, here’s me doing my spin on their workflow:

A macOS desktop displays multiple overlapping windows, including a NetNewsWire, Bear, and Ulysses.

Am I stealing like an artist yet? I hope so!

This setup won’t conquer writer’s block or slop out a newsletter opinion piece for you. But it’s a pretty dang good way to arrange the web, on your desk per se, so that you stay in your zone, not some algorithm’s. And it arranges the world so that neat ideas roll downhill from your feed reader to your notes and into your editor for digestion and posting to your blog.

This is a recommended way of writing on the web and thinking about the world.