Story

I moved from the US to Finland a few years ago and have been slowly learning the language. One of the things I found myself yearning for when I started was a reliable source of easy to read, high-quality Finnish; YLE's Selkouutiset (Clear News) was a perennial recommendation, but when I tried to figure out how to binge read a week's worth of its articles at a time I couldn't figure out a straightforward way to do that using the URLs they provided.

So I started my own daily archive with a very simple YYYY/MM/DD format, and I've kept it going ever since. The architecture is a little nonstandard as it uses Git submodules pretty liberally, but it means I have never lost a day's scrape since starting, and it's super easy to both host and hack on as a result. I use the static site generator Hugo to ultimately generate the Github Pages site. Simplicity begets longevity.

Tonight I added a small new feature to let my fellow language learners generate Anki cards on the fly for any article they care to. I have more such little tools at https://finnish.andrew-quinn.me/ for anyone who's interested, as well as what probably has a claim to fame as the world's fastest Finnish-English dictionary program at https://taskusanakirja.com/. It's a silly little niche but it's mine and I'm having fun.