PP Behind the Curtain: More Leverage

The original scripts showcased can be useful for more simple tasks like finding a particular article to include in a comment. But as your archive grows and your needs evolve, these simple scripts may no longer be as helpful as they once were. Here I'd like to showcase a few changes and highlight some possible avenues of creation to explore.

Improved Topic Reports

Building upon the original core Topic Report script, a new script has been created that is capable of searching through not only your news clipping archive but also can be configured to search through any other kind as well. For instance I can now search for the same keywords in my News, Comments, Posts, and Quotes archives. The results of each archive type are written to their own plain text files for easy viewing.

Some other additions to the script include the ability to search for multiple keywords and the automatic generation of a citation at the end of each clip. There is also a new feature which allows the script to automatically ignore news clips you've already used in your current writing project.

Automatic Source Outline

The ability to ignore already used clips relies on the output from an entirely new script. This new script will provide a list of all news clippings used in a piece of writing. This can be especially useful when working on larger pieces to help keep things straight in your mind.

You could also use the output to create a draft outline of your own writing as well. However as the outline file is overwritten everytime the script is run, if you are intending to use it for drafting an outline then you are advised to make a copy of the file and use that to do so.

Practical Uses

These two scripts have been developed & tested during the creation of a yet-to-be-finished collection of work, Life in Eddie's Shadow (LIES). This collection would have been much more time intensive to create and likely would have been of lower quality without the use of these scripts.

The ability to continually update the researched material as new content was added to the archive and exclude the already used content has saved me immense amounts of time & effort. It may not seem like much time in each individual instance but over the course of a writing project, especially a larger one, the little bits add up. It's also these little bits which can be the most tedious aspects of the writing process. Applying a bit of grease to reduce these frictions will hopefully encourage more to create.