Tuesday Tech Tip: Substack and RSS feeds

TL;DR: every substack has an RSS feed automatically, just put the root of the substack into your feed reader and it works!

With twitter in the final throws of having drunk from the wrong grail, I’ve been retooling my RSS feeds and such. Two years ago my main feeds were my RSS reader and twitter; I hadn’t realized how many RSS feeds had changed location or rotted away since I last did any weeding as most of those folks I also followed on twitter.

Substack seems to be the preferred location for folks looking to stand up a new web presence, and email newsletters are in. And that’s all fine, but my email client is just not where I want to read what we used to call blog posts.

I kept wishing there was an (easy) way to route newsletters to my feed reader, but there’s no obvious UI on substacks around feed locations or RSS subscriptions or anything.

And, I may be the last person on the web to learn this fact, but it turns out all substacks have an RSS feed built right in at /feed. Sane RSS readers will take the root URL of the substack and find it automatically. I guess this is one of those cases where RSS is such a foundational base layer to web tech that it’s one of the “batteries included” and it’s not worth advertising.

# Monday Tech Tip: BBEdit and using Enter as Return

Like many Mac-weilding software engineers, I edit a lot of text in BBEdit. My main rig has a full width keyboard with the numeric keypad. I tend to use the keypad a lot, since the reality of the day job is that I type a lot of numbers. Something that’s always bugged me about BBEdit specifically is that pressing the Enter key on the keypad doesn’t go to the next line.

Now, on paper—that’s the correct behavior. Return and Enter are, in fact, semantically different, and they’re labeled as such. But, as much fun as “Technically Correct is the best kind of correct” can be, I am not actually entering data into Lotus-1-2-3 in 1986, and as such I don’t really need an Enter key, at least not nearly as much as I need a second Return key over on the far right of the keyboard.

And I don’t know why this took me so long to figure out, because of course BBEdit has a setting for this.

Preferences -> Keyboard -> “Enter key generates Return”

And there you go, perfect, exactly what I wanted.

(And as a bonus, it turns out there’s also an option to make Home and End move to the start and end of the current line instead of the document. Which is absolutely my Windows accent coming through, but I don’t care, that’s how I prefer it.)