Yesterday’s Red Meat Friday post on Why Lisp “Lost” has a backstory. As I often do, I wrote it the night before and had it queued up for publication on Friday. But I also like to read through the posts one last time before I upload them to Irreal.
When I did that, I realized that I hadn’t provided a link to Alexander_Selkirk’s original post that anchored the whole discussion. I usually keep whatever site I’m writing about in a browser tab so it should have been easy to add that link. But something was wonky with that tab so I thought I’d just restart Safari and get things straightened out. But, unlike all my other tabs, that one didn’t come back when I restarted Safari.
No problem. My post has a link to the offending comment; I’ll use it to reload Alexander_Selkirk’s post. Except when I tried that I got a totally unrelated post in German. Argh! Next I spent an hour trying to find the post in the Lisp subreddit. That, of course, ended in tears.
Then I remembered that I had first discovered Alexander_Selkirk’s post in my feed. Since my feed reader is Elfeed, I realized that I could recover by simply asking Elfeed to find the post for me. Unlike many feed readers, Elfeed keeps a complete history of everything it shows you and has a powerful search capability so it was surprisingly easy to find the post. I simply looked for any posts discussing Common Lisp in the last six months. I was about to add the additional constraint of mentioning Steve Losh when I noticed that Elfeed was already showing me the desired post.
It’s like having a associative array into every post that’s ever appeared in your feed. If you’re using Emacs and not using Elfeed, you should think about switching. I’ve said before that Elfeed is one of those packages that alone make it worthwhile to use Emacs.