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Templates for Writing

  • May 10, 2011 16:24

I came across Geoffrey!, a website run by filmmakers Phil Jeng Kane & Edwin James Lynch, that offered a kick-start way of writing a story or article. The use of writing patterns separated from the structure of the story was intriguing — a concept similar to a Content Management System (CMS) but in this case an Article Management System (AMS).

Writing articles everyday is tough. Concepts are often vague and beginning an article often needs some form of kick-start. Adding a kick-start to work-flow on the surface appears a good addition to getting out of the tough stage.

The site got me thinking about using a well structured article reduced to template form combined with a macro processor, like m4, to provide the specifics. I tried it and it seems encouraging.

The work-flow required a macro file along with the template which would create a text file suitable for a program like txt2tags to take the article into some published form.

Not an original idea as I saw a website that took the concept a little further to build a blog management system

References:

1. http://geoffrey.com.au/automatic-story-generator/
2. http://txt2tags.org/
3. http://www.gnu.org/software/m4/
4. http://neidetcher.com/static_site_creation.html