W.O.W.

Word of the Week is designed to enrich vocabulary through weekly engagement. A Python script selects an esoteric word from a CSV file. This word, along with its definition and a contextual example sentence, is then emailed to a list of recipients. GitHub Actions automates the delivery process, ensuring the email arrives reliably at a predetermined time each week.

📩 Subscribe to recieve a word of the week.

👨🏻‍💻 For the story behind the project, read the blog post.

📚 See a selection of the books that have contributed to Word of the Week.

How to Use

Activate the virtual environment:

source wow_venv/bin/activate

Add New Words

1. Copy new words from 'new_vocab.txt' to 'new_words_list.csv'. Note: Keep the column headers in the csv file.

2. Run new_words_list.py to populate the csv with word types, definitions, and example sentences.

3. Check the csv file for any errors.

4. Manually copy & paste from 'new_words_list.csv' to 'words_for_email.csv'.

5. To sort 'words_for_email.csv' in Excel: Select all -> Sort & Filter -> Custom Sort -> Sort by 'word' -> A to Z. Note: Be sure to check My data has headers. This ensures that Excel recognizes the first row as headers and excludes it from the sort.

Test workflow locally

To send an email to just one person, run wow_dev.py. This requires the python-dotenv package to access the environment variables in the .env file. This is not required for the GitHub Actions workflow as that uses GitHub Secrets.

Note: If you have a .env file in your project directory and the Python extension installed, VS Code automatically loads these variables into terminals it opens. This is not the case in terminals outside of VS Code.

Test workflow on GitHub

1. Make sure the workflow YAML file includes the 'workflow_dispatch' trigger.

2. Under the 'Actions' tab, select the Workflow in the left sidebar.

3. Click the 'Run workflow' button on the right side of the workflow page.

4. Start the Workflow: Click 'Run workflow' again in the dropdown menu that appears.

Local data

Check for duplicates in 'words_for_email.csv' by running duplicates.py.

Create the alphabetized 'Word_List' XL Worksheet by running alphabetize.py. This creates a new file every time it is run. Note the encoding; some entries have been removed if they have accents (e.g, éclat).

Updates

Get the latest word count by running duplicates.py.

• Word count for 05/06/24: 556
• Word count for 23/04/24: 537
• Word count for 22/04/24: 532

Contact

🌐 followCrom: followcrom.online 🌐

📫 followCrom: get in touch 📫

Contributing

👷 Feel free to open a pull request or branch from this project. 👷

License

This project is open source and available under the MIT License.