Saturday, May 30, 2026
Amp your archive with stats
No law says your archive has to be boring. You can nerd it up with stats, which I have done with my own archive.
First, I figured out how to get Textpattern to automatically keep track of how many blog entries I made each year. I already knew how to do this for the grand total, so it was just a matter of making a few adjustments.
Now, as you scroll down, you can see the number of posts in the heading for each year.
Then I came across a nifty sparkline graph on Chris Burnell’s website. It’s an example of his web component, svg-sparkline. So, of course, I made one for Newsonaut.
It’s pretty simple to use, a lot simpler than trying to make one on your own. You just point to a JavaScript library that Chris has made available on a CDN, then customize some HTML to make it look the way you like.
The gradient option is a nice touch for the fill. You can also make it animate, with the line drawing itself from left to right. I thought about doing this, but decided not to get too carried away.
The graph itself, though, is a stark reminder that this blog started with a bang. I posted 170 articles in 2011, almost one for every two days.
At the time, I was working for a daily newspaper, so the idea of churning and burning was nothing new to me. But it didn’t take long for output to drop off. The low point was a single post in 2018.
There was a surge in 2020 when I decided to post every day in October. I thought it might get me into the groove of posting more often, but in the end I was just relieved that the month was finally over and I could relax.
I haven’t exactly been flooding the blog with words in recent years, but things have been picking up. This is my seventh post this month.
What’s helping is that I’ve been finding more and more inspiration from the indie web movement, the latest being a forum called 32-Bit Café. I’ve also seen some great examples at People and Blogs.
There are a lot of little things like the sparkline that keep me going, but mostly it’s the indie web ideal of writing for the pleasure of it.
More posts in the Blogging category
