As you all know, I am always writing about how much I like and use Journelly. One of the things that I always say is that since Journelly saves it data as an Org mode file—or, if you prefer, as a Markdown file—the file is essentially a database that can be queried and processed to produce other files.
Álvaro Ramírez has a very interesting post that describes one such workflow. Much like I might do, Ramírez adds an entry in his Journelly when he comes across some data about a movie he might want to watch. It may be an IMDB entry, a Reddit post, or even just something someone told him so that all he has is the movie or director name. The common denominator is that he adds a tag such as #film or #watch to mark those entries having to do with movies he should watch. Journelly can, of course, search on the tags but Ramírez has a better way.
First he extracts all the entries having an appropriate tag into a watchlist.org file. That gives him a file with all the movies he might want to watch. He uses this and the Claude Code agent to look up each entry in IMDB and to retrieve all the metadata for each movie from IMDB and put it in a db.org file. Finally, he uses the db.org file to generate HTML so that he has a browsable file showing each movie along with its poster.
Take a look at his post for the details and to see the final results. As Ramírez says,
At the center of all it all my beloved org syntax. Thanks to plain text formats, we can easily peek at them, query them, poke at them, tweak them, and bend til our heart’s content. It’s just so versatile and now we can throw them at LLMs, too.
Almost none of this is something you’d expect a text editor to do but the Combination of Emacs and Journelly provides a way of moving from free form capture entries to a polished, browsable file.