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For some years I've been watching my local non-league club Warrington Town FC. It's lots of fun as the ground is within walking distance and the whole experience is relaxed, friendly and entertaining.
Following the club online was difficult at first. It's not like League football which is covered by the main news sites. In the end I found Twitter was by far the best central source for news and reports.
There's a lot of good material out there but it seemed a shame for it to "disappear" within 24 hours as Twitter moved on.
In an effort to preserve the material I began archiving many, but not all, of the tweets associated with the club in an easily accessible format:
Using & Searching the Archives
- All the text is fully searchable using Ctrl+F. Search terms such as "Report", "Preview" and "Manager" are a good place to start.
- From 2018 on there are many more tweets containing links to picture galleries and video reports. To find these search for "Pics" and "Video" respectively.
- To search for a particular month type Ctrl+F then "February 2020" (or similar). This will highlight the first entry for this month.
- To view an original tweet click the blue link in the "Url" column.
Have fun looking for old match reports and comparing the pre- and post-match comments from the manager.
Technical details
Each media report was shared via Twitter. A category was added (Report,
Preview etc) along with a unique hashtag so the tweet could be found by a
simple Twitter search. Likewise the unique hashtag was added to related
tweets & retweets.
Finding a short, unique hashtag wasn't straightforward and in the end I had to settle on a composite hashtag (#COYY #WTFC).
The next step was automating the creation of the archive using ifttt.com. An ifttt.com task copies details of each tweet with the composite hashtag to a Google docs spreadsheet.
The data behind the web pages can be readily searched by year, month etc. If you'd like access to this type of data get in touch.
