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Lessons learned from 6 months of operating a tiny news archive

The best websites are home-cooked meals. Andrew’s Selkouutiset Archive was birthed after I realized there was no obvious way to fetch the previous articles of the “Easy Finnish” daily news broadcast. This annoyed me as a student of the language. “Here we have a stream”, I thought, “of high-quality, human-written, interesting practice material, and no easy way to access it!” So I went out of my way to create such a way, and me and my language skills have been profiting off of it ever since.

If at any point an issue appears, with e.g. the shell scripts that do the actual cleaning, I always have the option to simply revert to a previous commit and work fresh. Because I made sure to make the intermediate repo as easy to work with as possible, I later found it very straightforward to write a little Python program that could process all of the news into a flashcard format. At one point I thought perhaps I should add in some code to help people find the dictionary forms of the rarer words, but it turns out I already wrote a command line tool to solve that general case.

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