Jim Nielsen’s Blog
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Stats Page

I came across Brian Baking’s “Cool Things People Do With Their Blogs” which led me to Luke Harris’ stats page which motivated me to finally make something similar of my own.

I’ve written previously about enumerating the external and internal links on my blog. I’ve also written previously about graphing my blogging goals. All of these are different forms of representing stats about my blog, so really this was an exercise in making all these disparate statistical representations accessible in one central place: my /about page.

First, I created a general overview of stats surrounding my blogging over time. At the time of authoring this post, I have 11 years of blogging which has yielded 385 posts consisting of 364,601 words. A build-time generated chart from quickchart.io breaks down these stats over time.

A bar and line chart showing an increase in posts per year and words written per year from 2012 to 2022.

I’m not sure these numbers means anything to me — they’re just numbers. However, the 11 years of blogging is pretty cool I think.

Next comes the prevalence of tags on my site.

A bar chart showing the most common tags by occurence.

When I first generated this chart from the data, I discovered the generic (and useless) tag #thoughts was the most used, which I promptly pruned from all my posts. This is one of the reasons I like this “dashboard” of stats: it helps keep me responsible for tagging things in a way that’s useful.

Next comes my charts around internal and external links. At the time of this writing, I have 1,961 external links that go from my blog to some other site on the web with the top three spots occupied by: 1) twitter.com, 2) github.com, and 3) adactio.com. Not much of a surprise there, but it’s interesting to see the top 10 tags on a chart showing their proportions to each other.

A bar chart showing the highest recurring external links.

As mentioned earlier, these charts are generated at build time using the quickchart.io API. I get back an SVG which I embed in the page — with a few slight tweaks. Using SVGs allows me to style the charts for light and dark mode:

Two identical bar charts side by side, one in dark mode the other in light mode.

As well as themed versions that can dynamically re-paint to match my blog’s active theme color:

Two identical bar charts side by side in light mode, one colored blue the other red.

Two identical bar charts side by side in dark mode, one colored yellow the other green.

I’ll probably do more with this page in the future, but for now I’m satisfied. You can check it out here.