Need help with a text editing macro

Factual Questions
1

Need lots of help. Not even sure where to start.

I think what I need shouldn’t be too difficult though.

I publish a newsletter that aggregates news stories. There can be a hundred stories in any given newsletter so automating some of the tasks would be hugely helpful as right now it can be exceedingly tedious.

So, it looks something like this:

SECTION1

Headline1
Jane Doe, The Dispatch
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua.

Headline2
John Smith, The Post
At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum.
http://tinyurl.com/9umr
** Commentary about the story. --WaM
SECTION2

(And so on)

Thing is this all needs to be washed in Wordpress where the headline bolding and turning the URL at the end (which is sometimes followed by commentary) into a clickable link.

In Wordpress the HTML code looks like:

<strong>Headline1</strong>
Jane Doe, The Dispatch
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua.
<a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Custom Domain by Bitly;

(I do not know why Wordpress uses “<strong>” to bold things but it does.)

Anyway, it always happens that the first line of each story is bold and the HTML link needs to be made into a clickable link.

The comments I could add afterwards and formatting the section headers is no biggie (although they do break up the consistent format of story, break, story, break). So, I could run each section separately if that simplifies things and then join them after the fact. Whatever works best.

Note I can add any necessary plugins to Wordpress if I need to. Also, I can use Notepad++ or pretty much any other text editor as long as it outputs the HTML code as plain text that Wordpress will deal with.

Any ideas? Is what I am asking a lot harder than it seems to automate? Easy (I hope)?

Thanks in advance!

2

Where is the stuff coming from? For instance, how would you get the info for one of your entries?

Or will you already have it in a text editor program and just need help writing some formatting macros?

3

I cut-and-paste the stories from other web sites (basically news aggregation) and plop it into Wordpress (or a text editor like Notepad++).

I need to copy with no formatting since every website is different and I get wonky results doing a normal copy so I have a Firefox plugin which copies things as plain text.

After that is all done I need to go back and make each headline bold and make the links a clickable link in Wordpress.

It is exceptionally tedious, repetitive work and thought maybe a macro could do the job for me.

4

Might be worth checking out Windows Live Writer, a Windows application that can post to WordPress.

The question is if/how well it supports templates, and I don’t know frankly. It does support text styles, so that would be somewhat of a time-saver I think.

5

This would be a simple task for a grep-capable text editor. I use BBedit, but that’s a Macintosh program. There is probably something similar for Windows.