Stage one: acquiring my word list

Step one of my latest mini project was acquiring my word list from my Weeknotes posts over the past few years. Spoilers: I was able to do it all in Notepad++ and Excel. Although this wasn’t what I expected, I learned new ways to use tools that I already have, and I feel slightly less intimidated by my database — I even learned how to write a (very simple) query! I thought this was going to take potentially weeks to learn everything I’d need to, but instead it took a couple hours (including some poking about and a few false starts I’ve omitted). Here’s the process I followed and new tricks I learned. Accessing the data While my initial thought was to scrape my own website, my husband suggested I query my database instead. I asked my developer friend whether they thought it would make more sense to access post data by: querying my database and dealing with duplicative entries (~8 per post, ~1600 total) or scraping my website and extracting information from the full webpage (~200 posts)…