is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
Because it’s exceedingly easy to do so, because I like to tweak and tinker, and because I am procrastinating from various other design-related tasks today, I spent a bit of time this afternoon creating my own style sheet for Freshly Squeezed Software’s mixed-bag RSS aggregator (and the one that’s become my regular RSS client), Pulp Fiction. It’s called “Subtraction” and, as the name implies, it’s designed to look something like Subtraction.com. You can download it here for the cost of absolutely zero, but it’s also presented absolutely as is, with no warranties of any kind.
How to Get Style
After you’ve downloaded it, decompress the StuffIt archive, and copy the file “Subtraction.html” to this location: ~/Library/Application Support/PulpFiction/Stylesheets/, where tilde (~) is your Mac OS X home folder.
Below: How to dress like this site. The PulpFiction style sheet Subtraction in action.
I’ve tested this style sheet with the forty-odd feeds to which I subscribe and they basically all work pretty okay with it. It’s the ones that include images that will appear the least orderly — or the monst wonky — but that will be true with any of the style sheets included with PulpFiction or the others that you can download for it.
What It’s Good For
The real benefit of this style sheet, of course, is the special CSS rules that I included that will render Subtraction.com’s RSS feed with finesse. This means the thumbnails that I often include in the first paragraph of each post, the illustrative images, and the captions that accompany them will all render more or less in a manner that reflects my original intent.
I figure that the audience for this has to satisfy a few criteria: first, they have to be more than just mildly interested in what I have to say here. Second, they have to be users of PulpFiction. And third, they must possess the technical savvy and free time enough to bother to install the damn thing. So, all three of you, please write me back and let me know how it works.
Well, as the first of the three, I have to say that I like it very much. When I first started using Pulp Fiction it crashed so much and was so slow that my enthusiasm for it wore off well before I got nerdy about stylesheets. As such, I’ve stuck with the original, boring green one until now. But no longer.
There are still things that I don’t like about PF, but at least everything lools nicer now. Fanks.
I’d like to see an Alert But Not Alarmed style sheet! That gives me an idea: it would be nifty if Pulp Ficition could apply specific style sheets to specific RSS feeds, similar to some of the site-specific features that Omni is trying with its OmniWeb browser.
Regarding crashes: I had similar issues with PulpFiction early on. Recent releases have cleaned it up a lot. It’s still not the sleekest, but it’s mostly stable now. Well, it’s stable on my Power Mac G4 (MDD) anyway. On my PowerBook G4, it still crashes when left unattended. Still, I mostly like it a lot, though I’m still looking for the perfect RSS client.
The most scary thing Pulp Fiction has been causing lately – and I’m sure it’s a combination of factors, rather than PF on its own – is kernal panics if I set it to launch on login. The sound of a G5 with kernal problems is not unlike a 747 taking off, with all 900 fans running high.
You can drop the .html-file onto the application icon (dock or otherwise) to install it in the proper place.
Khoi Vinh: The per-feed stylesheet thingy was already requested, we’re considering it for a later version.
Virginia: Since PulpFiction does not install a kernel extension, all kernel panics resulting by the use of PulpFiction are soley Apple’s bugs (or any other manufacturer’s kernel extension). Unfortunately, there’s nothing we could do about that (well, except fixing Darwin’s code, but that’s not something we’re considering :).
Because it’s exceedingly easy to do so, because I like to tweak and tinker, and because I am procrastinating from various other design-related tasks today, I spent a bit of time this afternoon creating my own style sheet for Freshly Squeezed Software’s 
Well, as the first of the three, I have to say that I like it very much. When I first started using Pulp Fiction it crashed so much and was so slow that my enthusiasm for it wore off well before I got nerdy about stylesheets. As such, I’ve stuck with the original, boring green one until now. But no longer.
There are still things that I don’t like about PF, but at least everything lools nicer now. Fanks.
PS: It’s very strange, however, to see my site’s RSS feed styled to look like your site.
I’d like to see an Alert But Not Alarmed style sheet! That gives me an idea: it would be nifty if Pulp Ficition could apply specific style sheets to specific RSS feeds, similar to some of the site-specific features that Omni is trying with its OmniWeb browser.
Regarding crashes: I had similar issues with PulpFiction early on. Recent releases have cleaned it up a lot. It’s still not the sleekest, but it’s mostly stable now. Well, it’s stable on my Power Mac G4 (MDD) anyway. On my PowerBook G4, it still crashes when left unattended. Still, I mostly like it a lot, though I’m still looking for the perfect RSS client.
The most scary thing Pulp Fiction has been causing lately – and I’m sure it’s a combination of factors, rather than PF on its own – is kernal panics if I set it to launch on login. The sound of a G5 with kernal problems is not unlike a 747 taking off, with all 900 fans running high.
Hi, I’m one of the PulpFiction developers.
You can drop the .html-file onto the application icon (dock or otherwise) to install it in the proper place.
Khoi Vinh: The per-feed stylesheet thingy was already requested, we’re considering it for a later version.
Virginia: Since PulpFiction does not install a kernel extension, all kernel panics resulting by the use of PulpFiction are soley Apple’s bugs (or any other manufacturer’s kernel extension). Unfortunately, there’s nothing we could do about that (well, except fixing Darwin’s code, but that’s not something we’re considering :).