Blogging By Numbers

It’s no secret that I like reading posts about blog anniversaries, in part because of my project to restore two decades of blogging here into a single, unified place. There seem to have been many such posts recently, but Ruben’s might be the most unique.

Building on a post from twelve years ago that under the WordPress hood was given the $post->ID of 8888, Ruben returned to commemorate their actual 8,888th post.

Well, we’re here! Shiok! I’ve reached the luckiest post in my blog’s history, and it only took eighteen years since I started writing. It also gives me a shameless opportunity to do some inward reflection on where I am now, and where this site is going.

Which gives me the excuse for a brief follow-up on my recent design changes here, because over the past couple of days I’ve worked with ChatGPT again to come up with some more custom functions and shortcodes to enhance a couple of things.

The overall site description on the posts page, in addition to displaying the total number of posts and the total number of source sites, now also displays the total number of words and the total number of years represented by posts that either have been newly posted or brought in as part of the restoration project.

As of this writing, it reads:

There are 821 posts containing 391,235 words originally published across 15 sources over the 23 years between March 2000 and today, with thousands more still to be added as I work to restore two decades of blogging. I’m currently adding posts between July and August of 2019 from write.house/bix, then September 2019 from write.as/bix.

In addition, the source archive pages now include the relevant word count there in addition to the post count which I’d already had in place. I’m still working on getting ChatGPT to give me working code to handle a year count on these pages, and on the year archive pages as well, but so far we’ve had no luck through three different chats and multiple refinements to my prompt.

There’s no particular functionality in surfacing these numbers, but I think it will be interesting to watch them as I continue, slowly—ever so god damned slowly—pull in more posts from across all most of the places I’ve blogged over more than twenty years.

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Addenda

1. It turns out I slightly jumped the gun here, because I’d saved David Wertheimer’s acknowledgment of hitting twenty-five years intending to include it here but then forgot and only read it just now.

   When I reflect on what twenty-five years of blogging means, mostly it’s the persistence: my blog is still here, still publishing new content, at the same URL as when it was launched, and with almost all of the archives intact and readable. It’s not hard to do, but few do it, and when I’m blogging I’m continuing my commitment to digital longevity.

   One thing it’s hard to judge when you moved your blogging around as much as I have over two decades is David’s idea of persistence. It will be interesting, when all is said and done on the restoration, to spot where my gaps were, and how long they lasted.