50 Blogs: An Infographic

This is post number fifty. That felt like the kind of milestone that deserved a party, and since this is a data science blog at heart, the party includes confetti, a banner and a bunch of unnecessary plots.

Everything below is drawn live in your browser from the same JSON file that runs the blog itself, so the infographic *should* stay up to date. If you are reading this long after publication and the numbers have crept past fifty, you can consider this post "blog emeritus".

Fifty is also the first point where the archive is big enough to start exhibiting some shape, behaviors and such. So between the charts I have tried to be straight with myself about what this blog turned into: what I enjoy writing about most, what people read, and the discovery that, uh, they're not always teh same thing.

One hundred and thirty-eight thousand words. That's kind of crazy. That's a decent-sized novel and a half, mostly about whatever my brain wouldn't let go of and I didn't want to bore my wife or colleagues with (or at least not more than I already had). The fourth tile is the one that I have mixed feelings about: I like having so many draft ideas, some just bullet points or a few scattered paragraphs, it makes it easier to choose a topic I feel like when I have 15 minutes to write. But it also means my drafts just grow and grow, and I already know there are about 5 blogs I wrote out, went to revise, decided I didn't like them and deleted them. So I sometimes wonder how many drafts won't make it to the end, but I suppose that just comes with the process.

The publishing rhythm

I started in April: an opening sprint, a spring lull while I travelled to Colorado, and then July happened. Admittedly, a lot of my posts are shorter format, or reuse code I wrote years ago for demonstration purposes, making fifteen blogs in one month less crazy than it sounds. August is only a week old, but I don't think it'll grow much looking at my calendar.

Zoom in: this is every day since the first post, one cell per day. GitHub feel.

Mondays are the most common publishing day, which makes sense, because I like to write at the weekend mostly then try to publish when I think people are more likely to click while bored on a commute or during a lunch break. 12 July, when four posts went out in one day, was not intentional. I had planned to publish 1 and draft the others but I accidentally had them in the queue for publishing, thankfully they were mostly done.

Tags and what they say about me

Tags are categories of a sort, and the totals appear to be something of a personality test. Technology and personal are tied at the top, which fits thematically about what this site is: half machine and half diary. Books outnumbering television which appears once doesn't surprise me: I read a lot more than I watch TV or movies.

I started this blog assuming it would be somewhere I could talk vaguely about whatever I feel like, but would probably end up just being a professional portfolio of some kind. I've since learned that the posts I am most eager to write, and proudest of afterwards, are the discursive ones: the philosophy and the social questions. They're the most fun, encourage the most discussion with friends and people who read them.

The clearest evidence is that Everyday Ethics became a series retroactively. I wrote four essays about responsibility, prevention, tolerance, and supply chains over three months without once noticing they were the same project, and only recognized that once I hit blog 50. I've added other blogs into series, and made pages dedicated to series now, too. I think this is healthy: some topics deserve returning to, or expanding upon, or link nicely together so readers might enjoy them in a specific order.

The same tags get more interesting when you spread them over time. April was books and AI, May and June drifted personal, and July was the month the technology tag ate the blog, because that was the month I rebuilt half the site and wrote about what I did (and more are in drafts!). This wasn't planned at all: topics tend to come and go on whims.

Tags by hours

There is one more way to slice the tags: by reading time instead of post count. Counted this way the leaderboard flips: technology has the most posts but they are quick reads. The personal essays are where the hours actually live, with books close behind.

Fifty dots

Every post on this site is a dot. Time on X, word count on Y, and its main tag for the colour. The band between one and three thousand words is my default length it seems. The dot at the top is the accessibility post at 9,158 words. The one scraping the floor is a 900-word story about ending up in Italy through mistaken identity.

The first twenty-five posts have a median of 2,755 words. The second twenty-five have 1,936. I am expressing brevity over time, unintentionally.

The pile of words

What gets read

These are all-time page views from analytics for the most-read posts, and lets address the Cthaeh in the room: one post about a fantasy novel that has not been published in fifteen years has collected more readers than everything else on this site combined, several times over. Yeah, one post went viral, so my stats are a bit iffy.

I wrote it in one long sitting. The 9,153-word accessibility chapter I laboured over doesn't even crack the top five in views (reminds me of my thesis now that I think of it). There is a lesson in there about audiences, and I am choosing not to learn it, because I will just continue to write whatever I feel like regardless.

Every post with tracked views, positioned by how many words I wrote against how many people read them. The vertical axis is logarithmic (because of the Rothfuss article). If effort predicted readership this would be a rising diagonal line. It is not a rising diagonal line.

A footnote for fellow data people: the Rothfuss number is actually two numbers. I renamed that post once ("fourteen years of silence" became "fifteen years of silence", I somehow failed to count and published before realizing my mistake), and its old address kept collecting readers for months. The figure above merges both.

Elsewhere on the internet

There is also a readership I can only see from a distance. On Reddit, there is a discussion thread about the Rothfuss blog, and it has now been viewed 300,000 times.

For scale, that is roughly eight times every page view this site has ever recorded, across all fifty posts and every other page, combined. The most-read thing connected to this blog is a forum thread about the blog. Shows how often people read a headline and discuss it on social media, and how few actually click the source material.

A decent share of the twenty-eight thousand almost certainly walked over from there, which makes my biggest referrer a comment section full of people waiting for a book.

The small print

Across the 118 days between the first post and the fiftieth, the blog averaged 1,169 published words per day, counting the days I wrote nothing. I think this is largely due to the fact I write some every day, or at least edit, and when I write I tend to write a lot, perhaps an entire draft, and create a couple other drafts I have for ideas for future posts at once.

Titles run from 16 characters ("Ant Colony, Live") to the 105-character Rothfuss monument, and only two of the fifty end in question marks, so apparently I prefer telling to asking.

What I've learned doing this

What I love writing and what gets read are different. The views chart is ruled by a post about a fantasy novel, and the essays I care most about live in its shadow.

The mailbag tells the other half of it. The one email about a non-Rothfuss post was about the most discursive thing on this site, from a reader on another continent who found it by googling an idea (also neat that I come up on a Google search!). Search traffic arrives in crowds for the topical stuff, and the philosophical stuff gets found by one person at a time, but they actually write in and discuss the ideas with me. That was so nice.

Volume was never the goal: I'd rather have a few people engage than thousands who don't.

So the next fifty will lean harder into the discursive essays, because I enjoy it. The drafts folder is stacked with cognitive biases, ethics, and questions about meaning, far more than gadgets and code. The technology posts will keep coming, because rebuilding this site is apparently a hobby I document compulsively (twelve parts and counting).

The queue

About those 135 drafts: they range from nearly finished essays to single sentences I clearly believed were profound at the time (even if on second read they're awful!).

Four of them are planned as entire series, and the queue leans discursive: biases, ethics, meaning, and the occasional myth that needs debunking. At the current pace the queue would last well over a year without a single new idea arriving, and new ideas arrive weekly, so the realistic projection is that the drafts folder will continue to outgrow published posts.

The mailbag

The best part of the Rothfuss emails is that the two most thoughtful Rothfuss letters take opposite sides. One reader argued, carefully and at length, that a fandom's broken trust should carry consequences, that admiration and trust are different things, and that the charity chapter still stings years later.

Another wrote that anyone who has wrestled a long, enormous endeavour knows how daunting it must be, and that the entitled anger aimed at the author misses how fortunate we are to have the first two books at all.

One reader in India googled "the individualization of responsibility", stayed to say the site was organised enough to borrow from someday, and promised to cite the post on WhatsApp to friends and family. Loved waking up to that email. He also has his own blog, which is a great read!

Another, an Austrian living in Germany, checks the web every so often for a Doors of Stone release date (in vain, as they put it, till date), landed on the Rothfuss piece instead, and then read half the M*A*S*H post before remembering they had never seen M*A*S*H but kept reading anyway. How nice is that?

Thank you

Read a random post

Fifty posts in, people are reading: subscribing by email, arriving from search engines at two in the morning, following the RSS feed, leaving comments, and sending the occasional message that starts "I read your post about..." and makes my whole day.

Being read turns thinking out loud into a conversation, and I am grateful for every one of you, from the person who has read all fifty to the twenty-eight thousand who came for Rothfuss and left.

Thank you for reading. Here is to the next fifty!