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I recently started using Google Reader to get quick updates on my favorite blogs and the activity of my Facebook friends all in one place. If you are new to the idea of subscribing to RSS feeds, here’s are some tips to help you get going.

• Find out what an RSS feed is. If you’re not exactly sure what an RSS feed is, read the quick summary on Wikipedia.
• Add Google Reader to your Google account. Just login at http://www.google.com/reader and you’re ready to go.
• Put a “Subscribe” button up on your bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. That way, when you’re on a website that has an RSS feed to which you want to subscribe, you can just click the button on your toolbar to add it to Google Reader.  To get the button, at the upper right of the Google Reader page, click Settings > Reader Settings > Goodies, then scroll to the bottom of the page. Drag the yellow “Subscribe…” button up to your bookmarks toolbar.
• Start subscribing to RSS feeds. Most every blog and news site has an RSS feed behind it. Go visit a favorite blog or news site and click that “Subscribe…” button you put on your toolbar. You’ll be taken back to Google Reader where you’ll be given the option of subscribing to the feed.
• Subscribe to your Facebook feeds. There’s an RSS feed for the notifications you receive on Facebook, your friends’ posts, their notes, and their status updates. This web page will tell you how to find the URL for each.
• Keep on subscribing. Blogs and news organizations aren’t the only sites with RSS feeds. If you have friends that use StumbleUpon, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, you name it, you can subscribe to feeds of their activity, too. If you’re not sure if a site has an RSS feed, click the “Subscribe” button anyway and see if one is found. The worst you’ll get is an “Oops. Can’t find a feed” message.
• Put Google Reader on a sidebar in Firefox. You won’t even need an add-on to do it. Just add a new bookmark on your bookmarks toolbar that leads to http://www.google.com/reader/i and put a check beside the option to “Load this bookmark in the sidebar.” That’s the address of Google Reader for mobile devices, so it will give you a trimmed down view of your feeds.  Clicking the button you added will display it in a narrow column on the left side of Firefox.

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I snagged the enchilada recipe from About.com and the rice recipe from FoodNetwork.com and just made a few minor changes. Since you don’t use an entire can of pinto beans, you can mash them, add a little salt and water, heat them in a pot or microwave and serve them with some melted cheese on top.

Beef Enchiladas

• 1 tsp olive oil
• ½ cup chopped onion
• 8 ounces lean ground beef
• 2 tsp cumin
• 1 cup pinto beans
• 1 14.5-ounce can diced tomatoes
• 1 4-ounce can diced green chiles
• 4 flour tortilla wraps
• 1 jar Newman’s Own salsa
• ¼ cup shredded cheddar cheese
• ¼ cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Coat an 8-inch square baking dish with nonstick cooking spray.

Heat oil in a large nonstick pan. Sauté onions until translucent. Add beef and cook until no longer pink. Add cumin, beans, tomatoes and chiles. Cook for 10 minutes until sauce is reduced.

Spread a little salsa on each tortilla. Spoon beef mixture into each of the four tortillas. Roll up and place seam down into the baking dish. Add additional salsa to the top of the tortilla rolls. Top with shredded cheese. Bake for 20 minutes.

Yellow Rice

• ¾ teaspoon ground turmeric
• ¼ teaspoon ground cumin
• Pinch of cinnamon
• 1 ¾ cups water
• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 cup jasmine or basmati rice
• 2 tablespoons sliced scallions

Boil water in an uncovered pot. Add butter and melt it completely. Add turmeric, cumin, cinnamon and salt, then stir. Add the rice. Cover and reduce heat to a bare simmer. Cook for 20 minutes covered without stirring until the rice is tender. Remove from heat and let sit covered without stirring for 5 minutes. Fluff with a fork, add scallions, and serve.

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Over the years I’ve tried a few different task list websites and iPhone apps like Remember the Milk, iProcrastinate and the tasks panel built in to Gmail. None have compared to the simplicity and ease-of-use of Todoist.com. For starters, it has all of the key features you would expect from a task manager like due dates and priority levels. On top of that, the main features I love are the …

• outline format. Any task can be indented to make it a sub-task, which is great when you want to break a project down into smaller steps.
• customizable home page. The main page will show any search results you choose. For example, my home page shows my tasks which are due today, tomorrow, and then my priority 1 and 2 tasks.
• ease of navigation. With Todoist you make your own list of categories and color code them. They’ll show up in the left column with the total number of tasks they contain. One click and you see all of the tasks in that category.
• viewable history. If you are working toward a goal, I think it’s important to be able to see what you’ve already accomplished. Many of the other to do list managers just make tasks disappear into the ether when you complete them, but Todoist will let you see what you’ve done thus far.

For some reason when they released their iPhone app, they decided that naming it “Todoist” would make it too easy to find, so they went with the name “Doings” instead. Well, the real reason may be that the app was not developed by the same  folks that created the website. In any case, it’s great that they do have an app which syncs with your Todoist account so you can see and update your tasks anywhere.

One suggestion: to keep yourself from getting overwhelmed with all of the things you need to do before you achieve personal enlightenment and transmogrify into an orb of light that cannot conceive of any aspiration beyond merely  existing, give yourself no more than five top priority tasks at a time and leave the rest buried in their categories. That way you can  focus on completing just a handful of tasks which are most important.

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A friend of my wife dreamed up this drink recipe. Might be good for a party, and it’s very easy to make. Just add:

• 3 parts blood orange soda
• 1 part dry gin

It seems like the blood orange soda would be hard to find, but Target carries Archer Farms Italian Blood Orange soda.

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I’ll try out new Firefox add-ons here and there, but not all are keepers. These are five I can’t live without and would recommend to friends and loved ones over a light Sunday brunch or a sunset excursion on the Rhine.

1. StumbleUpon

SU is to the web what Pandora is to music. Tell SU what interest you and it will recommend similar sites. It’s like having a “channel up” button right on your web browser.  One great feature is the “Share” button on the SU toolbar that lets you quickly send a site to another SU user or an email address. http://video.stumbleupon.com is also an excellent way to discover video clips aligned with your interests, even if you’re only interested in videos of people haphazardly hurting themselves.

2. Delicious Bookmarks

There are plenty of similar tools and add-ons that will let you store your bookmarks online as Delicious will.  I can’t say I’ve tried them, though, since Delicious does the job so well. Just tag the site you want to bookmark with one or two keywords and where ever you, where ever you go, it will be right there waiting for you, just like Richard Marx. Even if you don’t have Firefox your or the add-on installed, you can still access your bookmarks by hitting http://delicious.com/yourusername. Too easy.

3. FastDial

If you liked the home page Google’s Chrome browser gave you but not enough to make the switch, Fast Dial will give you a close approximation. FastDial lets you tile your Firefox home page with clickable thumbnails of your favorite sites. Sure, you could put those same sites up on your Firefox bookmarks toolbar, but this just looks so gosh darn snazzy. Only bummer is that it doesn’t render Flash in the site preview. Maybe the preview generator runs on an iPhone.

4. Search Preview

This add-on will insert small previews of each site listed on a Google, Bing or Yahoo search results page, so it’s easier to quickly identify sites you may have visited once before. It will also show each site’s popularity on a tiny bar graph. Like FastDial, it’s not a must-have, but just looks pretty.

5. WiseStamp

If you use Gmail or Yahoo for your email, this add-on will allow you to automatically insert a spiffy email signature into the messages you send.  I’ve tried some other methods and none worked quite as well as WiseStamp. It’s especially good if you use your email account for business. Include a logo, a link to your website, your Twitter account, and so on and so on, and so on.

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