Blog analysis for 2012: ~133,000 words so far

Dec 26, 2012| blogging, quantified

I reviewed my blog posts in 2012 and rated them on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 indicates my favourite posts – the ones I want to keep around and refer back to, or the ones that represent key moments in my life.

I’ve been pretty good at keeping to ~1 post a day, although travel and family time meant I was away from my computer during much of September.

Year-by-year comparison:

Observation: I write fewer posts, but I feel better about them.

Number of words in 2012: ~133,000 (~ 380 words per post)

Flesch reading ease: 62 (down from last year’s 65)
Gunning Fog index: 12 (up from last year’s 11)
Flesch-Kincaid grade level: 9.2 (up from last year’s 8.4)
Unique words: 9,318

Observation: Fewer words, but bigger ones.

Looking at the three-word phrases I used the most, I can see that I continue to use my blog for a lot of planning. They’re mostly the same as last year’s words, except that “a lot of” has dropped down to fourth place from second.

	Times
	This year	Last year
I want to	238	158
so that I	115	94
that I can	113	76
a lot of	89	126
be able to	86	86
in order to	67	55

For comparison, here’s the analysis from last year, and here’s the post spreadsheet with ratings.

You can view 6 comments or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

6 comments

Doug Pratt (@DouglasGPratt)

2012-12-27T04:34:39Z

Thanks for sharing your analysis. Writing a post a day is very admirable and significantly better than my 2-4 per month!

Sacha Chua

2012-12-27T04:37:50Z

Having realized that the best way for me to remember something is to post it where Google can find it and other people can remind me about it (and that's happened - people have pointed me to things I've completely forgotten writing about!), I try to share as much as possible of what I'm learning. =) I've been thinking about splitting off more topic-focused views (or even separate blogs) for people who may not want all the updates. If there was something like that, is there a set of categories you'd prefer to read about, or do you like the variety?

jehz

2012-12-27T05:11:24Z

wow u are soooooooo geeek! hehehe... pati number of words used may total. Magawa nga din to sa blog ko... hehe. And may readability test scores pa. O__O

Thanks for sharing about this Sacha. Now I have an idea what to write on my next blog post. :D

jehz

2012-12-27T05:15:10Z

And oh... what online tool or software are you using pala to calculate Flesch–Kincaid grade level and Gunning Fox index?

Sacha Chua

2012-12-28T20:56:17Z

Jehz: Yung Lingua::EN::Readability gem sa Ruby. =)

Doug: I'll be sure to post more of those too!

Doug Pratt (@DouglasGPratt)

2012-12-28T08:01:24Z

I like the variety. Of most interest to me are the sketchnotes and sketchnote processes, and your business adventures.