Stats

Last night I asked Andrew to pull together some statistics for my blog. Like, I could tell that my total posts per year had gone down over time, peaking at 539 (in 2008, the year I was raising only one baby and moved to Egypt) and dropping down to 231 (in 2022, the year I was raising my sixth baby and finishing my master's degree). There are many other reasons for my total number of posts dropping over time, especially since 2010—Rachel offered the fact that I've had, like, four babies between 2010 and now (and mentioned that she was going for an absurd number of babies...but then realized that four was accurate in my case) and Andrew offered the fact that we moved from Egypt to, uh, Orem (which kind of dialed back our "excitement" level). 

Still, I wondered whether my post length had increased (it had) and whether that would even out my total word count—like, I wanted to know whether I was writing fewer posts (obviously) but ultimately hitting the same word count annually. The answer is, that my post length is up on average but my word count is trending downward.

Given how much I've had to write for grad school, it's logical (if not unfortunate?) that my blog word count has suffered. On the other hand, perhaps the stories I'm telling are better curated, better told...than they were twenty years ago when I started this blog? That's a little trickier to analyze.

At any rate, my total word count for the blog (when Andrew scraped this data last night, so excluding a few posts from last night and this morning) is 4,968,436. That's a lot of words!

Here are some word counts from some famous works (I'm easily 4x any of them...though not so widely read, of course):

The King James Version of the bible: 783,137 words
The Harry Potter Series: 1,084,170 words
Shakespeare's plays: 884,421 words

Queen Victoria is estimated to have written around 60 million words, however, so I have a ways to go before I match her pen!

Next year I may make a goal to post more often here and less often on Facebook (where I typically post my short, cute stories of the kids...at least first...because I typically write it in a truncated form, whereas my blog has become rather long-form). I don't like the direction Facebook is going. 

My theory about why blogging fell out of public favour is not because people didn't enjoy it—they did!—but because it is not as easy for corporations to control or monetize. My facebook feed is already full of advertisements. And now they're planning to flood the platforms with AI users?

And I just...that's a huge no-thanks for me.