I have an online German-English terminology database, where I store technical terms arranged according to subject matter. I have written a PHP/ MySQL program, which fetches terms from this termbase and tweets them on Twitter at regular intervals. The tweets are output to my Twitter handle (@languagetech). These regular tweets are made by a "cronjob". This tweeting is fully automated and the tweets are compiled randomly. I wrote the software for this system in PHP/ MySQL.
This termbase can be searched online from this Website and a random selection of tweets from the termbase are output on the site. This is to give searchers an idea of the topics covered in the termbase and the terms stored in it. I wrote this online search routine in PHP/ MySQL. The structure of this termbase is described in a brief technical specification.
The termbase can be accessed from the onsite glossaries, as well. More English terms for a particular German term in a glossary are also retrieved from the database, in some cases. For example, see the term "Betriebsmittel" in the Mechanical Engineering Glossary. If you click on this term in the glossary you will get more English terms for the German term "Betriebsmittel" as used in fields other than Mechanical Engineering.
Proceed as follows:
I have written Visual Basic macros for Word and developed my own Web pages in HTML code and PHP/MySQL.
Macros are programs that run on Microsoft Word, for example. A macro can be written to do almost anything you can otherwise do manually in Word from the keyboard. They are particularly useful for carrying out repetitive tasks. They can be called with a shortcut from the keyboard or by clicking on a user-defined button in a toolbar. Even though some of the macro coding can be automated, there is still a lot of code you have to write manually.
Visual Basic is very different to other programming languages, and is quite difficult to code. It is, however, an excellent language for processing texts (i.e. written language). It gets slow if you are trying to process a lot of data. If your database is not too large, you can store the data in ordinary files, but with large amounts of data it is better to store the data in a database.
I've listed some of the macros I wrote myself, and which I use all the time. You might find it useful to kook at them to see how I've used Visual Basic commands. I've also started a small Visual Basic Tutorial, which I hope to build on by degrees. I will try to explain different aspects of programming in the tutorial.
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