An Alternative Use For Scrivener - Steem Post Catalogue

It has been a few months since I bought Scrivener. Its producers describe it as a typewriter, ring-binder, and scrapbook - providing all the tools a writer needs to create their literary masterpiece. You can organise your chapters, research notes, and character sheets. You can write drafts, polish and edit them in subsequent iterations until you are ready for Scrivener to output your novel in your format of choice, be it an eBook for Amazon or a manuscript to an agent / publisher.

As you can see in this screenshot, I have been using it to organise my Emerus project - which is a fantasy collaboration with @rhondak and @bex-dk. There is a lot of world building for us three to work off, so Scrivener is ideal for me to keep tabs of characters, names, places, species, events etc. so that we are all on the same page so to speak.

The ease of which you can organise projects got me to considering using Scrivener to document my Steem posts. Why would I do this? As you know, Steemit does a poor job of searching, using Google's service. On top of this, if like me you make several posts a day, it can be tedious to scroll through your own timeline to find a particular post. This is made three times as difficult for me as I have this account, my @Muxxybot curation account and @thewritersblock account to manage. Having pondered using Scrivener in such a fashion I mentioned it to a few people, only to learn that @shadowspub already does so. This either confirmed that we are both mad, or my idea wasn't so crazy after all.

The past few days I have been adding my posts to a new Scrivener project. In the binder on the left, I decided to create a folder per month, inside which I catalogue my posts. Each post is given a different icon depending which account it is published from - blue for GMuxx posts, green for Muxxybot and red for The Writers' Block posts. These don't have to be completed posts either - as I have ideas for posts, I can add a new card and mark it with a 'to-do' status, such as the 'Using Scrivener to catalogue posts' at the top of the list. In addition, I have a 'notes' section where I can drop down useful information including sections of text and graphics used as a post template, header or footer in Steem. I also added a 'witness notes' folder where any witness related information can be stored.

Inside the actual card I copy and paste the markup from Steemit should I ever need to copy any elements - as you know, after seven days you no longer can edit and have access to the editor in a particular post. For this reason, I have only included this past week's posts.

I can have my data represented either as cards on a corkboard, such as here

Or in a list like this

In both views you can read a short synopsis for each post so that I can see at a glance what I am looking for.

To make searching through all of my posts easier, I have tagged them all with keywords - much like the tags used on Steem. The search in Scrivener can be focused on tags, text, labels (which I use to differentiate each account) among many others, making it a powerful way to search through my posts.

I then create an external reference, adding a link to the actual post on Steemit.

As I am becoming ever busier on Steem, I think this is an invaluable way of managing my posts among the three accounts. For example, rather than scroll through my blog on Steemit to find a contest post, I can simply drop the closing date and link into the synopsis in Scrivener, along with prize fund details. A quick search through 'contests' and the GMuxx label will find the relevant information for me.

I enjoy finding alternative uses for software and different tools.

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