Blueprint

A blueprint is an article shape you save once: a headline pattern, the sections the writer must keep, and the blanks you fill in each time you run it. Cross the shape with your own values and you get one article per combination.

Each combination is a full run of all nine desks with its own sources. It is not one article copied with the words swapped.

The headline pattern

The best {{service}} in {{place}}

Anything in double braces is a blank. Write {{city}} in the pattern, in a section heading, or inside a section's guidance and it becomes a variable to fill at run time. You never declare them separately - they are found by reading the shape, so deleting the last mention removes the variable.

Once the blanks are filled, that line is handed to the desk as the title and kept word for word.

What a section carries

Four things:

• The heading becomes an H2 and is kept exactly. The desks rewrite prose but never structure, so they cannot add, rename, reorder or drop one.
• The kind shapes how it is written: Prose, At a glance, Ranked items, Pros and cons, Questions, Verdict. Each adds a real instruction, so "Pros and cons" comes back as genuine advantages and honest drawbacks rather than more prose.
• The word range is its length. The budgets add up to the article's target and override the domain's default, so eight sections of 80 words is a 640-word article.
• The guidance says what it should actually cover.

Guidance is the quality lever. It is what stops forty articles in a set reading like one article with the town changed.

Up to 12 sections. Past that, more sections do not buy more words - they just make every section thinner.

Filling it in

Type values comma separated or one per line for each blank, or load a saved list to pull in a table you keep. A blank with no values blocks the run rather than shipping {{place}} inside a real headline.

Every combination, or line up rows

Every combination multiplies: 2 services against 30 towns is 60 articles. Lining up the rows pairs them positionally instead - row 1 with row 1 - and stops at the shortest list. Loading a saved list switches to lining up, because a spreadsheet row already is the pairing.

A run is capped, and it says so first

25 articles at a time, with the real count shown before you press anything. Run it again after a capped run and it picks up exactly where the last one stopped.

Starters are copies, not links. Picking one inserts your own editable blueprint; editing it changes nothing for anyone else.

Related: Assignment when the list is topics rather than one shape · The nine desks