Creating an automatic weekly link roundup from a defunct blog with web scraping

I found a fun blog that was active in the 2010s (and sadly is no more) called The Hairpin.

I thought, "I wish I knew about this blog 10 years ago so I could keep tabs on the articles!"

But then, I realized I could use R to automatically deliver a weekly link roundup so that I could pretend I was reading the blog every week while it was still active.

Here's what I did:

1. Scrape all ~15,000 blog post links from The Hairpin and write them into one csv.
2. Each time the script is run, randomly choose 10 articles and put their links into a pretty table (with hyperlinks).
3. Update the original csv with all of the links with a new column showing when each link was chosen so that they are not chosen twice.
4. Set up taskscheduleR, an RStudio AddIn, to run the script and export that weekly pretty table into an html that I can peruse.

It was a lot of fun. If I hadn't already grown up with it, I'd also consider doing this with Rookie.

A remaining challenge:

Learning how to send that pretty table in an email. I suspect Google's Gmail servers have gotten pretty selective about what gets through, even though I input my Gmail username and password for security.