great! i also found a nice plugin from c2c (https://www.coffee2code.com/archives/2004/06/30/plugin-get-custom/) that has several functions to fetch custom field data
for now i guess the custom fields would work, but in the future i want to have a separate form just for post size, because its a bit of a pain to explain how custom fields work to all my users, since you have to type in the key each time and they get assigned to the post separately.
thank you though – that was a lot of help.