Looking at my blog post stats by year

| blogging
blog-stats.svg
Figure 1: Blog statistics

I was curious about the shape of my blog over the years, excluding Emacs News and my link-heavy weekly/monthly reviews. It started off with lots of little posts like the way other weblogs were also quick links and notes. As weblogs morphed into blogs with more text, I also settled down into fewer, longer posts with lots of code (analyzed by looking for <pre> blocks). I wrote much less after A+ was born. Interestingly, I've been shifting towards longer posts with more images.

  • Blog posts exclude permalinks that match emacs-news|review|week-ending, which casts a bit of a wide net but should give me the general shape of things.
  • Total words per year and average words per post both exclude code snippets.

Here's how I got those numbers: 

(append
 '(("Year" "Posts" "Total words" "Words per post" "Posts with pre" "Posts with images")
   hline)
 (cl-loop for i from 2001 to 2024
          collect
          (let* ((default-directory (expand-file-name (number-to-string i) "~/proj/static-blog/blog"))
                 (exclude (shell-quote-argument "emacs-news|review|week-ending"))
                 (files (format "find . -name '*.html' | grep -v -e '%s' | " exclude))
                 (posts (string-to-number
                         (string-trim
                          (shell-command-to-string (concat files "wc -l")))))
                 (words (string-to-number
                         (replace-regexp-in-string
                          "TOTAL: " ""
                          (shell-command-to-string
                           (concat files "xargs ~/bin/count-words | grep TOTAL")))))
                 (posts-with-images
                  (string-to-number
                   (string-trim
                    (shell-command-to-string (concat files "xargs grep -l '<img' | wc -l")))))
                 (posts-with-pre
                  (string-to-number
                   (string-trim
                    (shell-command-to-string (concat files "xargs grep -l '<pre' | wc -l"))))))
            (list i
                  posts
                  words
                  (/ words posts)
                  posts-with-images
                  posts-with-pre))))
Year Posts Total words Words per post Posts with pre Posts with images
2001 3 438 146 0 0
2002 31 4336 139 0 0
2003 863 64953 75 0 59
2004 967 125789 130 2 98
2005 679 135334 199 4 40
2006 869 171042 196 19 42
2007 489 107011 218 33 32
2008 380 121158 318 85 57
2009 400 175692 439 81 20
2010 335 160289 478 93 19
2011 324 163274 503 93 28
2012 286 124300 434 111 12
2013 273 173021 633 172 11
2014 272 186788 686 138 30
2015 173 133682 772 82 36
2016 25 11560 462 13 6
2017 37 24063 650 6 2
2018 66 46827 709 7 8
2019 18 13054 725 3 6
2020 13 6791 522 4 5
2021 31 17389 560 8 16
2022 21 11264 536 4 9
2023 68 47188 693 26 52
2024 74 58439 789 27 40

And here's how I plotted the charts: 

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
df = pd.DataFrame(data[1:], columns=data[0])
# Create a figure with subplots
fig, (ax1, ax4, ax2, ax3) = plt.subplots(4, 1, figsize=(10, 12))
fig.suptitle('Blog Statistics by Year', fontsize=16)

# Plot Posts
ax1.bar(df['Year'], df['Posts'], color='lightblue', label='Other posts')
ax1.bar(df['Year'], df['Posts with pre'] , color='darkblue', label='With preformatted blocks')
ax1.set_title('Number of posts per year')
ax1.set_ylabel('Posts')
ax1.legend()

# Plot Posts
ax4.bar(df['Year'], df['Posts'], color='lightblue', label='Other posts')
ax4.bar(df['Year'], df['Posts with images'] , color='darkgreen', label='With images')
ax4.set_title('Number of posts per year')
ax4.set_ylabel('Posts')
ax4.legend()

# Plot Total Words
ax2.bar(df['Year'], df['Total words'], color='lightblue')
ax2.set_title('Total words per year')
ax2.set_ylabel('Total words')

# Plot Words per Post
ax3.bar(df['Year'], df['Words per post'], color='lightblue')
ax3.set_title('Average words per post')
ax3.set_ylabel('Words per post')
ax3.set_xlabel('Year')

# Adjust layout and display
plt.savefig(f)
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