Blog Stats

Number of Posts, by Kind, per Month

I’ve been blogging since 1998 (although few posts survive from the early years), initially on the Avatar Diary (hosted on Castle of the Four Winds and then AvAngel.com), later on Scatmania.org, then finally on DanQ.me. This graph shows the number of posts for each month from January 1999 onwards, broken down by the kind of post. Click and drag to zoom in and explore, or on the legend to control which kinds of content are displayed.

Further reading:

• The Avatar Diary, the very oldest contemporaneous posts still existing on my blog, from 1999 (there’s older content on the site, but it’s not stuff that was shared in a “blog-like” form first time around)
• Scatmania Launched, my 2003 post (re-)launching my weblog after a period of absence
• On This Day In 2003, published 2011, reflecting on the eight years my blog had been running in its current form (i.e. since switching to Scatmania.org), at that point
• A Suitable Blog, from 2016, marking a total wordcount of 594,000 words across my posts
• 20 Years of Blogging, my 2018 post commemorating two decades of this lark
• DanQ.me ecosystem: an exploration of my tech stack in 2019, published on the 15th anniversary of switching my blog to WordPress
• When do I blog? – a 2021 chart looking into the kinds of content I create throughout a calendar year

Number of Posts, by Kind, per Month of Year

Some kinds of content are represented more-heavily at different points in the year. This is especially true of checkins, which often represent geocaching/geohashing logs and are biased away from the Northern hemisphere’s winter:

Longest Daily Streaks

Sometimes I’ve managed to blog consistently, every day, for weeks at a time. Here are some examples:

1. 2024-08-25 — 2024-12-13 (245 posts over 111 days)
2. 2024-01-01 — 2024-02-06 (50 posts over 37 days)
   A streak powered mostly by my participation in Bloganuary 2024, a daily prompt challenge running throughout January! On 27 January, it became my longest ever daily streak.
3. 1999-09-26 — 1999-10-21 (26 posts over 26 days)
   This streak covers the first day of my admission to Aberystwyth University and the first tranche of my Cool Thing Of The Day posts, chronicling my first months at University. It remained my longest ever consecutive daily streak for over 24 years.
4. 2020-02-26 — 2020-03-17 (31 posts over 21 days)
5. 2024-04-17 — 2024-05-05 (44 posts over 19 days)
6. 1999-10-24 — 1999-11-10 (18 posts over 18 days)
   A second tranche of Cool Thing Of The Day posts.
7. 2003-06-30 — 2003-07-14 (26 posts over 15 days)
   A decent streak of posts, including the first time I juggled fire and how I couldn't get the experience out of my mind until I bought my own fire juggling kit and promptly and predictably injured myself with it.
8. 2022-11-13 — 2022-11-24 (20 posts over 12 days)
   Lots of geocaching, plus - among other things - observations on identity on Mastodon, stargazing as a metaphor for my experience of therapy, and experiments on making WordPress talk Finger and Spring '83, and some pictures of breakups expressed as HTTP status codes.
9. 2020-02-03 — 2020-02-14 (14 posts over 12 days)
10. 2019-04-17 — 2019-04-28 (26 posts over 12 days)
11. 2018-10-28 — 2018-11-07 (24 posts over 11 days)
12. 2006-05-04 — 2006-05-14 (16 posts over 11 days)
13. 2005-01-04 — 2005-01-14 (23 posts over 11 days)
    A series of daily posts of varying lengths during a particularly active part of my blogging history.
14. 2018-12-07 — 2018-12-16 (25 posts over 10 days)
15. 1999-11-12 — 1999-11-21 (10 posts over 10 days)
    Cool Thing Of The Day continues with another week or so of daily posts.

Longest Dry Spells

Occasionally I’ve ended up taking long breaks from blogging with no posts whatsoever, like these times:

1. 2015-11-25 — 2016-01-06 (42 days)
2. 2012-12-21 — 2013-01-22 (32 days)
3. 2015-10-30 — 2015-11-25 (26 days)
4. 2008-07-11 — 2008-08-06 (26 days)
5. 2016-01-06 — 2016-01-31 (25 days)
6. 2010-04-22 — 2010-05-17 (25 days)
7. 2008-11-03 — 2008-11-26 (23 days)
8. 2019-12-01 — 2019-12-23 (22 days)
9. 2009-11-01 — 2009-11-23 (22 days)
10. 2007-10-08 — 2007-10-30 (22 days)
11. 2022-04-21 — 2022-05-12 (21 days)
12. 2016-02-08 — 2016-02-29 (21 days)

100 Days To Offload

The #100DaysToOffload challenge asks personal bloggers to try to publish 100 posts in a year. The table below indicates which years I’ve achieved that in.

Pedants might claim that not all of my posts should count as posts (for example, many of my checkins are imported geocaching logs; my reposts are often very short posts promoting other people’s articles, and so on), so I’ve added an additional number enumerating only articles, notes, and videos (vlogs), where applicable.

Year	Posts	Success?	Notes
1998	7	❌ No	Some posts are lost from 1998/1999. If they were recovered I might have made 100 posts in 1999, but probably not in 1998 as I only started blogging on 27 September 1998.
1999	66	❌ No
2000	2	❌ No
2001	11	❌ No
2002	5	❌ No
2003	189	🏆 Yes	Achieved 1 September, with a post about an article on The Register about timewasting. Or, if we allow reposts, three days earlier with a repost about Claire's car being claimed by the sea.
2004	374	🏆 Yes	An early win on 20 April, with a made-up Chez Geek card. Or if we allow reposts, two days earlier with thoughts on a confusing pro-life (???) website.
2005	381	🏆 Yes	In a highly-productive year of blogging, achieved on 7 April with a post about enjoy curry and public information films with friends. If we allow bookmarks (I was highly-active on del.icio.us at the time!), achieved even earlier on 18 February with some links to curious websites.
2006	206	🏆 Yes	On 21 July, I shared a personality test (which was actually my effort to repeat an experiment in using Barnum-Forer statements) - I didn't initially give away that I was the author of the "test". Non-pedants will agree I achieved the goal earlier, on 19 June, with my thoughts on a programming language for a hypothetical infinitely-fast computer.
2007	166	🏆 Yes	Achieved on 2 July with thoughts on films I'd watched and board games I'd played recently. Or arguably 12 days earlier with Claire's birthday trip to Manchester.
2008	86	❌ No
2009	79	❌ No
2010	159 (84 for pedants)	✅ Yes*	A heartfelt post about saying goodbye to Aberystwyth as I moved to Oxford on 16 June was my 100th of the year. Pedants might argue that this year shouldn't count, but so long as you're willing to count checkins (and you should) then it would... and my qualifying post would have come only a couple of days later, with a post about the Headington Shark, which I had just moved-in near to.
2011	177	🏆 Yes	Reached the goal on 28 October when I wrote about mild successes in my enquiries with the Office of National Statistics about ensuring that information about polyamorous households was accurately recorded. Or if we earlier on 9 June with a visual gag about REM lyrics if you accept all my geocache logs as posts too (and again: you should).
2012	129 (87 for pedants)	✅ Yes*	My 100th post of the year came on 28 August when I wrote about launching a bus named after my recently-deceased father. You have to be willing to accept both checkins and reposts as posts to allow this year to count.
2013	138 (59 for pedants)	😓 Probably not	I'm not convined this low-blogging year should count: a clear majority of the posts were geocaching logs, and they weren't always even that verbose (consider this candidate for 100th post of 2013, from 1 October).
2014	335 (22 for pedants)	🙁 Not really	Another geocache log heavy, conventional blogpost light year that I'm not convinced should count, evem if the obvious candidate for 100th post would be 18 May's cool article about geocaching like Batman!
2015	205 (18 for pedants)	🙁 Not really	Still no, for the same reasons as above.
2016	163 (37 for pedants)	🙁 Not really
2017	301 (42 for pedants)	🙁 Not really
2018	547 (87 for pedants)	✅ Yes*	I maintain that checkins should count, even when they're PESOS'd from geocaching sites, so long as they don't make up a majority of the qualifying posts in a year. In which case this year should qualify, with the 100th post being my visit to this well-hidden London pub while on my way to a conference.
2019	387 (86 for pedants)	✅ Yes*	Similarly this year, when on 15 August I visited a GNSS calibration point in the San Francisco Bay Area... on the way to another conference!
2020	221 (64 for pedants)	✅ Yes*	Barely made it this year (ignoring reposts, of which I did lots), with my 21 December article about a little-known (and under-supported) way to inject CSS using HTTP headers, which I later used to make a web page for which View Souce showed nothing.
2021	190 (57 for pedants)	✅ Yes*	A cycle to a nearby geocache was the checkin that made the 100th post of this year, on 27 August.
2022	168 (55 for pedants)	✅ Yes*	My efforts to check up on one of my own geocaches on 7 September scored the qualifying spot.
2023	164 (86 for pedants)	✅ Yes*	My blogging ramped up again this year, and on 24 August I shared a motivational poster with a funny twist, plus a pun at the intersection between my sexuality and my preferred mode of transport.
2024	431	🏆 Yes	Writing at full-tilt, my hundredth post came when I found a geocache near Regents Canal, but pedants who disregard reposts and checkins might instead count my excitement at the Ladybird Web browser as the record-breaker. This year also saw me write my 5,000th post on this blog! Wowza!
Total	5,292		Total count of all the posts. Doesn't add up? Not all posts feature in one of the years above!

^* Pedants might claim this year was not a success for the reasons described above. Make your own mind up.

More information about my participation in the challenge.