Hi Joel - I have always felt that the purpose of these posts was to encourage people to reconnect with the reasons they got involved in the hobby in the first place - for the pure love of chips! The look of them, the weight in your hand, the colors and designs, the stories behind acquiring favorite chips, the organizing of your collection, trading with other collectors, and so forth.

So that's a long way of saying that I do not have a database that helps me come up with ideas - rather I use these posts to stay in first hand contact with my collection... I flip through chips (and scans of chips) on a regular basis looking for similarities, differences, connections, common characteristics, and oddities... whatever theme jumps out at me is what I post that day.

The ChipGuide is an invaluable resource for this and many other purposes - great search capabilities can be found there.

I hope that answers your question!