PP Behind the Curtain: The Power of Archives

With the proliferation of search engines and high-speed internet many people underestimate the value that personal news archives and other local repositories of information can provide. Your personal archive may pale in comparison to Google's, or even something more specialized that a corporate journalist might use, but yours is 100% personal to you.

The main benefit provided by a personal news archive is the ability to more easily find a past link for present referencing, whether that is for a comment or a longer piece of writing. If your news archive contains clipping files in a standard format (see here) it can become even more powerful.

I use two scripts to help me leverage my news archive. One of them searches the text of my clippings to find keywords and just outputs the results to the terminal. This is useful for finding a specific clip I'm looking for, usually to use it in a comment or reply. The second script also searches the clippings for keywords however this one combines the clips it finds into one file. In addition it creates a second file containing a list of the filenames of the clippings contained in the first file, this provides a rudimentary table of contents. This script is particularly useful for putting together blogs as it will bring together a number of clips on a specific topic for easy viewing & quoting.

For example, I utilized the second script to pull all clippings with the keyword "covid". I then read through the newly created combo file to get an idea of what I had. While doing so I was pulling out pieces of clips that seemed like they might be useful along with their source link. I pasted these new clippings from the archive into a new plain text file. A second new file was used to create a summary of each new clip as I pulled them out. This has the added benefit of helping you develop an outline for your work.

In another new plain text file I then began composing the draft of the blog post "Bill Gates & The Covid Crazies" (check out "Nullifying the Elite" for another example). I typically will begin by using my outline to help me order the pulled clips in the draft. I find that words are magnetic and having the clipped content already in place helps shape the text that will join them together. It also makes it easier to paraphrase any content that you don't end up direct-quoting in your final piece.

Once the piece is finished and ready to be posted I use a final script to create a temporary file containing the finished post with all of the blank lines removed. This saves time when posting as a blog on Minds. Otherwise Minds will treat any blank lines as deserving of their own text block in the blog editor requiring you to go in and delete each one manually. If you don't you will end up with large gaps between paragraphs in your blog post.

Using simple scripts and processes like this, you can analyze a large volume of information, pull out what might be useful, and then bring it all together into a new piece of work that will hopefully provide new value to your readers. The larger the archive grows the greater the possibilities. Stay tuned.