Dr. Drang put up a year in review post in which he uses some shell commands to look at his 2015 posts and word counts.
I thought it would be fun to do the same for Take no one’s word for it. Except that I wanted to look into the pre-2015-past and get the data into R so I can cook up some plots. You gotta have your plots.
Number of posts
This is Dr. Drang’s one-line bash command to get post counts per month.
I wanted to get output that included the year and month of each word count, so I modified his one-liner to become:
Which gives me this output:
Visualized:
Word counts
Here’s Dr. Drang’s one-liner for calculating word counts:
I wrote a lot more in 2015 than in previous years. The total number of posts and words is almost double or more than double those of the next best year, and there are fewer months with no posts at all.
I enjoy writing and I want to keep this trend going into 2016 and beyond. It takes effort and time to write each post, especially if code is involved, but I think I get better and faster with practice.
Dr. Drang’s posts are “kept in a Dropbox directory called source, with subdirectories for each year and sub-subdirectories for each month.” The first shell command in his post, ls */* | wc -l and specifically the */* part handles that organization. I keep all my posts in one flat directory, and I wrote my scripts accordingly. If you want to use any of those code, you’ll naturally need to modify them to fit your file structure. ↩︎