Help me help these deserving people - Web Content creation edition

Post date: 2026-07-03 03:02:41

I'm trying to help what I believe are a worthy constituency. Someone even older and less technically savvy than me has created this great resource. It's mostly a list of social providers for an area that adds up to a small tome of hope. My goal is to update and digitalize this in a way that sort of future proofs it and makes it easier to use and update. I know this is well covered ground (moving data between mediums to generate reports) and there must be lots of good solutions.

This thing is about 40 pages when printed and it's formatted as an opensource text document that lives in Google Blogger. It's contact information org name, phone, website, email, location, description] and then some other flourishes like maps of public bathrooms and art by local residents. Conceptually it's simple on purpose.

What have I done so far?
- I use Excel/GSheets a lot and to me it makes sense to update this by saving the information in a way that's table-readable. I have updates for the 150-ish entries stored in this way
- I have some formatting updates and simplifications and have reorganized sections in small ways.
- I've added more spatial content with linked googlemaps

What am I asking for help with?
- The big thing, is in spite of a lot of time searching for elegant solutions that work for my skill level, I haven't found anything to easily go from table data to formatted text. The blog version in Blogger can be viewed either as text or as html and I'm learning about the syntax for the latter (slowly). But I don't have a good way to use my usual tricks (concatenate, textjoin, etc) to go from table to text.

- Now that I've added updates in a table form, there are basically three formats where this project lives, (i) the original OSword document from the creator of this project, (ii) the blogger post that is the current online version of the OSword doc created by a previous helper and (iii) my updates in table form.

- I'm hoping to get something where updates in the table (which will be regular but more limited going forward) can be translated into text for future versions without manual updates.

- There are other wrinkles, like that the final text version needs to be all of the above (i) available online, (ii) printable as a textdoc/pdf/etc and (iii) that both of these can be translatable to foreign languages.

The current incarnation involves Gsuite, MSsuite and Apache's applications, but I'm open to using any tool, provided it's not too technical.

The best-case version is that this is something:
- using free apps
- not burdensome or niche to learn how to maintain
- as automatable as possible

Thanks for taking a look!
(FWIW, this really is a project that serves the most vulnerable and the idea is to develop this in a way that could be scalable to other regions)

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