Maggie McGuire

Running a newspaper solo means constantly bumping into problems that don’t have good solutions. So I build them.

Cairn

An Obsidian plugin for composing long-form writing from your notes. Pull quotes, rearrange blocks, build an essay from research you’ve already done. I use it every day to write stories for the paper.

Cairn treats your vault as a research library. You mark notes as sources, then pull quotes and passages into a workbench where you can rearrange them into an essay. When you’re done, export clean prose. It’s the bridge between research and writing that I couldn’t find anywhere else.

Flint

An Obsidian plugin that strikes two random notes together and asks: what does the collision reveal? Productive randomness—it surfaces connections you’d never find browsing your own files.

Select a folder, hit the spark, and Flint pulls two notes at random. You write what the collision makes you think of and save it as a new note. It’s a creative warm-up, a way to find unexpected threads in your own thinking, and occasionally the start of a real story.

Old Article Notice

A WordPress plugin that warns readers when they’re looking at old content. I wrote 13 lines of PHP for my newspaper, realized every publisher has this problem, and turned it into a real plugin with a settings page, live preview, and per-post controls.

Configurable age threshold, custom messages with template tags, visual styling, category exclusions, and a per-post disable for evergreen content. One file, zero front-end JavaScript, and it just works.