The ASS Counter

In summary, the counter is my firstborn child. My beloved. The silly little tally counter/table/sheet that has been with me through hell and back (since August 22nd, 2020). It started as a way for me to keep track of how many times I mentioned Shuuen on any given day, but then later evolved to capture major current interests / passions that would become a regular part of my vocabulary. Prior to October 14th, 2024, it was named the "S Counter", due to words prior to "Akechi" on the counter beginning with the letter S.

(At some point, Stanley was a word on the counter (June 2022 -> August 2022) in reference to the Stanley Parable, before getting removed due to a loss in interest.)

The most recent notable addition to the counter was on October 14th, 2024, when Akechi was added to the counter in reference to Goro Akechi from Persona 5.

The most recent notable addition to the counter was in July of 2022, when Sonic the Hedgehog became a major interest. This word has flourished in the bot ever since, to the point of being said more than twice the total number of times as Shuuen.

The ASS Counter has been through many developments. Originally, the data was kept on a plain Google spreadsheet (archived here), with statistics calculated using a crap ton of formulas. It was just that for the longest time, actually. Until:

• On January 17th, 2022, I made a Twitter bot out of it using a combination of Zapier (later moving to Microsoft Power Automate) and more complicated Google Sheets formulas. Note: Separate from this, I learned Python, my first (proper) programming language, in the same month.
• In January of 2023, I added tally boxes that had scripted functionality (using Google Apps Script) to increment the value of a cell by one, so I didn't have to manually type numbers myself anymore. I also had it automatically add new rows every day.
• On April 12th, 2023, I wrote a Python script to run in the background of my computer that would automatically increment the counter when I typed Shuuen/Sonic or pressed certain hotkeys.
  • Around the same time, I wrote a similar script I could manually activate on Home Assistant from my phone to perform the same task, minus the keyboard tracking.
  • Also around the same time, I integrated the ASS Counter with my personal Discord bot, so that I could increment it using commands.
• On April 20th, 2023, when the Twitter API's free functionality got limited and MS Power Automate stopped providing a shared application for the Twitter API, I finally migrated the bot to a Python script (scheduled to run with cron on my Raspberry Pi) using Tweepy, while still pulling data from Google Sheets using Pygsheets.
• On May 4th, 2023, this page was created.
• On October 19th, 2023, I finally stopped using Google Sheets to store the tally counter's data, and moved the table to an SQLite3 database. I still needed a way to keep this page live, so I wrote a simple bash script to export the database to a markdown file and upload said file to Github as a gist every hour, which would then be embedded onto this webpage.
• On November 11th, 2023, I ditched Github's gist embed to write a cleaner one, using Showdown.js to convert the contents of the markdown file to an HTML table.
  • And then I also wrote an absurdly long tangent gushing about a project featuring a table with useless numbers. Which is what you see here.
• On February 5th, 2024, I ditched using Python's keyboard module for hotkeys and hotstrings and replaced my startup Python script with an AHK script. AHK is definitely more suitable for this job.