It's My Party

I've often thought of 7 as my lucky number, or at least something of a favourite. I write 7 with a line through the vertical on recommendation after my poor legibility in fourth year maths mixed it up with 2. The reason I shoehorned that memory in is because the blog is seven years old today.


Two years ago I remarked on the decline and bottoming out of this blog before its sudden revitalisation. Despite 2010 going on to be my most productive year of late, I noted that was still overshadowed by the post counts of the first eighteen months of blogging. I instead looked at word counts, and arduously totalled up each post. 2010 is the clear winner with almost 40,000 words against the 27,000 of second place 2006. Yet this was no consolation to the disappointment of 2011, for whilst I wrote over 20,000 words last year that was less than in 2006 - and I was convinced I was more productive than in 2006. A straight word count couldn't illustrate a change in quality, until I happened to mess about with the graph settings on Google Docs and placed post count on the left axis and word count on the right axis. The ensuing image perfectly depicted the change at the heart of the matter.

"I make lots of graphs"

The graph can be summed up as follows: lots of short posts in the early days, fewer but longer posts in the latter days. The blue areas are quarters (for clarity) where the average number of words per post is low, while the red areas highlight quarters in which the average word count is high. In this light the two wordiest years can be compared on an approximation of quality. The posts of 2010, while less numerous, are twice as long as those of 2006. 2011's average is almost the same as the previous year even though it was half the number of posts. The average for 2012 currently stands at almost four times that of 2006. Looks like I won't be crying at my own party after all. Ah, that brings the post count to my other recurring number - 12.

[358]