My Art Blog Posting History

Checking on the date of my previous blog post immediately after posting AVG Anti-Virus and Comodo Firewall To The Rescue, I was slightly shocked to see that it was my first blog post since August 18th, 2012. It seemed to me that I had posted much more frequently in the past and I became curious about my track record. Just how well does my current blog posting frequency compare with previous years?

My first step was to collect the necessary data. I logged in to my phpMyAdmin account and ran the following SQL query on my WordPress database:

SELECT `wp_posts`.`post_title` , `wp_posts`.`post_date`
FROM wp_posts

It turns out that I've written 210 posts since starting this blog on Oct 13 2006, which was 2206 days ago. Considering the number of days that have elapsed since that time, that works out to just one post every 10 days. That doesn't sound so bad until I look at the average period between posts for 2012 – which is one post about every 17 days. 2012 compares poorly with 2008 which was my best year with me averaging one post a week.

My next step was to write a Processing program that would read my data file and graphically summarize my monthly posting record (yes I could have produced a bar chart with Calc or Excel but where's the fun in that?). The graph above is the output from that program. Each vertical bar represents the total number of posts for that month with each year being assigned its own color. A quick scan makes it clear that my posting frequency/quantity has declined. Clearly my posting isn't what it used to be.

One thing I plan to do to up my posting frequency is to blog about some of my art projects, principally small screen-size experiments with digital painting, photo manipulation, and algorithmic art techniques.

So until next time (which hopefully won't be too long a time) I leave you with the words of American humorist Robert Benchley (1889-1945) who quipped "It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."

| Return to the Blog Index | This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2012 at 10:12 am and is filed under Computing, Odds and Ends, Processing.