Running a newspaper solo means constantly bumping into problems that don’t have good solutions. So I build them.
News Tools
Tools for journalists and news websites. Built from the problems I run into covering a small town every day.
Old Article Notice
A WordPress plugin that warns readers when they’re looking at old content. Set a threshold, write a message, style the notice, and it handles the rest — no JavaScript on the front end, no performance hit. Running in production on the Moab Sun News.
v1.2.0 features: modified-date awareness (skip the notice on recently updated articles), coverage links that point readers to newer stories on the same topic, SEO integration with Yoast and Rank Math, developer filters for customization, per-post overrides, template tags for dynamic messages, and a live preview settings page.
Download v1.2.0 — Upload the ZIP in WordPress under Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
Story Assembler
An Obsidian plugin for reporters. Organize raw notes, interview quotes, and source documents into story structure — then export clean copy. The journalism-specific version of Cairn, built around reporting workflows.
In development.
PKM Tools
Personal knowledge management tools for Obsidian. For anyone who thinks in notes.
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 make you think of? A creative ideation tool built from your own material.
Select a folder, hit the spark, and Flint pulls two notes at random. You write what the juxtaposition makes you think of. Over time, it surfaces forgotten ideas and makes unexpected connections across your archive.
Maggie McGuire 