In this project, we posed a few questions about the prevalence of URLs on Stack Overflow, specifically those related to paste sites like http://www.Pastebin.com and http://www.JSFiddle.net. To get started answering these questions, we downloaded data from the Stack Overflow postings (and other Stack Overflow data as well) from the Stack Exchange public file release. We built a MySQL database and eight tables to hold this data. We then created smaller 1,000-row versions of each of those tables for testing purposes, populated with a randomly selected sample of the data. From these test tables, we extracted the URLs mentioned in each question, answer, and comment, and saved them to a new clean table. We also extracted the source code found in the questions and answers, and saved those snippets to a new table as well. Finally, we were able to build some simple queries and visualizations to help us answer the questions we posed at the beginning.

Despite its modest results, from a data...