Blogging milestones |
Loading ...A couple of milestones are approaching for this blog. One of them is shown below and the other will be happening at 12:01am tomorrow.
Can you guess what these events are? For those with blogs, how close are you to these events? I’m a huge believer in goal setting. Look into the future, set short, medium and long term goals (some realistic, some not), and then work toward their achievement. Once achieved, set new goals. Wash, rinse, repeat.
You’re gonna pass the 1 million words mark while celebrating July Fourth (at 12:01 a.m.) AKA your third anniversary for the blog… (http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20060703/1/)
Just a wild guess.
Comment by Gerald Buckley — July 3, 2006 @ 1:53 pm PST
Wow, you’re almost to 3500 posts and 1 megaword. I’ve posted 193 times, but my version of WordPress doesn’t seem to provide a word count and right now I’m not up to writing a plugin for that. Do you have one?
Comment by Sterling Camden — July 3, 2006 @ 1:54 pm PST
You’re correct, Gerald.
Sterling, I rolled my own code on this one, not sure if other WP wordcount plugins exist (I’m guessing they do). I could probably turn mine into a plugin pretty fast though if you search around and don’t find anything you like. Let me know
Actually, I have a few more features I’d like to add.
Comment by TDavid — July 5, 2006 @ 3:24 pm PST
Here’s one: http://www.aquinashub.co.uk/projects/wordpress-plugins/word-stats/
It even has a built-in formattable widget. Note: you must edit or add a post to update the stats.
Comment by Sterling Camden — July 5, 2006 @ 5:34 pm PST
Chip’s Quips:
* Words: 56037
* Posts: 206
* Average words per post: 276
* Days since first post: 175
* Days since last post: 0
Chip’s Tips:
* Words: 17558
* Posts: 68
* Average words per post: 272
* Days since first post: 1855
* Days since last post: 1
Comment by Sterling Camden — July 5, 2006 @ 5:55 pm PST
Thank you for the pointer, Sterling. I tried that out to see if it might be better than what I’m using. It’s a lot better in terms of being able to display customized formats all over the place in WP. It is well integrated into Wordpress while mine is merely a quick external hack.
However that plugin has at least one error that generates inaccurate data being returned. Here’s what it shows for this blog:
* 324 words per post
* 3510 posts
* 1137650 words in posts
* 2410 days from first post to now
* 0 days since last post
* 2410 days from first post to last post
* 472 words per day, between first and last post
I definitely like the buffed numbers
Try re-running the plugin after editing line 77 as follows:
Line #77 FROM:
$post_words += str_word_count($entry->post_content);
TO:
$post_words += str_word_count(strip_tags($entry->post_content));
Also, I didn’t check the code on this one, but 2,410 days for a blog that has been in existence three years and one day? My math says the correct number should be 1,096 = (365 * 3) + 1. You’re development blog has been in action for over 5 years (1,855 / 365 = 5.08 years)?
I will see about porting my external hack into a basic plugin that can be shared with others who might be interested, including yourself. I haven’t contributed any wordpress plugins yet, but the format seems pretty straightforward. Also would like to add a few other wordcount-related features that will appeal more to authors than readers and that the above plugin doesn’t provide.
While on this discussion this reminded me of my adventure in 2004 with the National Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) where I know there were other WP-powered wordcount programs discussed and shared. I checked out their site earlier today and saw they have a wordcount API available during their annual writing month (November of each year).
Comment by TDavid — July 5, 2006 @ 8:07 pm PST
[…] You can see the widget in action in the sidebar on the right if you’re viewing this at my site. I placed it both here and at Chip’s Tips. Oddly, even though the number and frequency of my posts differ widely between the two sites, the average number of words per post is about the same. I guess I run out of gas around 270 words. I’ve got a ways to go to reach TDavid, who is at almost one megaword. Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
Pingback by Plugin to plug your blogging progress -- Chip’s Quips — July 5, 2006 @ 8:18 pm PST
Interesting. Tags would increase word count, no doubt. Yes, ChipsTips has been in operation since June, 2001 — although I only recently converted it to WordPress, I kept the original post dates in the conversion.
Comment by Sterling Camden — July 5, 2006 @ 8:35 pm PST
I made the correction you researched, TDavid. Now my stats show:
Chip’s Quips:
* Words: 47225
* Posts: 207
* Average words per post: 231
* Days since first post: 176
* Days since last post: 1
Chip’s Tips:
* Words: 15268
* Posts: 68
* Average words per post: 230
* Days since first post: 1856
* Days since last post: 2
So I’m also consistent in my amount of markup per post, it would seem.
Comment by Sterling Camden — July 6, 2006 @ 1:03 pm PST
It’s interesting how close your two blogs are together in average word count, Sterling.
I did do a little work on converting my code into a WP plugin last night. Should have more on this soon, probably in a new post. I would like to run my plugin across all our blogs and compare the difference in word count between them.
Comment by TDavid — July 6, 2006 @ 1:15 pm PST
Yeah, I was a bit surprised by that, even though I had an intuition that it would be true (making the revelation even more surprising). Some of my posts are quite long, and others very short, but I usually run out of breath at about 230 words, I guess.
Comment by Sterling Camden — July 6, 2006 @ 1:21 pm PST
230 words? Hmm, maybe I should quit working on my next (maybe next) post. It’s nearly 2,500 words!
I like longer entries for subjects I’m interested in even though I know some believe blog posts should be short and to the point in the interest of maximizing people’s time.
Must be the unpublished fiction novelist in me crying out.
Comment by TDavid — July 6, 2006 @ 2:22 pm PST
Well, I generally like shorter posts that pack a punch, but if the subject is interesting and there’s a lot to say about it, then I don’t object to longer posts. Sometimes I get a feeling, while writing, that my audience’s attention span should be just about up by now. That’s where I stop.
Comment by Sterling Camden — July 6, 2006 @ 2:59 pm PST
Then maybe you want to print this post out then. Too long?
Comment by TDavid — July 6, 2006 @ 3:50 pm PST
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Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Hmmcast #15: Birthdays, Rocketboom fireworks and blogger obligations — July 7, 2006 @ 3:42 pm PST
[…] A couple weeks ago Sterling asked me what I was using for counting words. At the time I’d been using some code I threw together shortly after switching to Wordpress. It worked well for me because it had all the pertinent post informatino from the blog on a single page. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Keeping count of the published and unpublished words on your Wordpress blog — July 25, 2006 @ 5:51 pm PST