Better Article Indexes Through Chemistry

No, silly, through code, not chemistry

I’m creating a spreadsheet of all my articles. It looks something like this.

This is a big project. So far I’ve added 40 stories by giving it an hour of attention daily, which means it will take me three months or more to finish it.

Just the spreadsheet alone will help me track down links to articles. It will also help me avoid publishing a different version of the same tale twice.

But my ultimate goal is to export that to a CSV file and then write a simple program to create a set of nested menus that would help me and anyone else find things in specific categories.

So, for example, there will be a top level menu for Technology, for Privacy, Wealth and every other tag I have used. There will be one for all curated stories and i will have one for my favorite posts. Those same menus will also be nested under a menu that has my publications as its top level. Any tag might end up under multiple menus. Each tag will also list other tags. It sounds complicated, but the code is simple and the result can always be hand-edited as well.

But we can’t do that, Tony

Unfortunately, we cannot paste HTML into Medium, which means I’d have to put it on another…