Andrew Savory: Statistics

Borrowing from Alex King’s Simple SQL Queries for Blog Stats, here’s some stats on this blog.

• The first post “It’s alive!” was made on 31st May 2003, some nine years ago.
• There have been 1,572 posts.
• On average, there are around 160 posts a year.
• Most posts are comfortably over 1000 characters long.
• The average post is about 170 words long; the longest is currently FOSDEM 2011: Saturday, and the shortest is This week’s addiction (whatever happened to…)
• There’s been an inexorable move toward fewer, longer posts in the last few years.
• These stats don’t include this post. I’ll leave that madness to xkcd.

Meta meta…

Here’s some useful queries for getting blog stats from a WordPress database.

Get first and last post:

select min(post_date) as start, max(post_date) as end from wp_posts;
+---------------------+---------------------+
| start               | end                 |
+---------------------+---------------------+
| 2003-05-31 10:35:11 | 2012-01-13 18:14:58 |
+---------------------+---------------------+

Get number of posts:

select count(*) from `wp_posts` WHERE post_status='publish';
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|     1572 |
+----------+

Get number of posts per year:

select YEAR(post_date), count(*) from `wp_posts` WHERE post_status='publish' GROUP BY YEAR(post_date);
+-----------------+----------+
| YEAR(post_date) | count(*) |
+-----------------+----------+
|            2003 |      154 |
|            2004 |      329 |
|            2005 |      501 |
|            2006 |      225 |
|            2007 |      176 |
|            2008 |       75 |
|            2009 |       17 |
|            2010 |       19 |
|            2011 |       70 |
|            2012 |        6 |
+-----------------+----------+

Get average number of posts per year:

drop table if exists average_posts;
create temporary table if not exists average_posts
select YEAR(post_date) as Year, count(*) as Count from `wp_posts` WHERE post_status='publish' GROUP BY YEAR(post_date);
select avg(Count) from average_posts;
+------------+
| avg(Count) |
+------------+
|   157.2000 |
+------------+

Get average length of posts (in characters) per year:

SELECT YEAR(post_date), AVG(LENGTH(post_content)) FROM `wp_posts` WHERE post_status='publish' GROUP BY YEAR(post_date);
+-----------------+---------------------------+
| YEAR(post_date) | AVG(LENGTH(post_content)) |
+-----------------+---------------------------+
|            2003 |                 1260.8182 |
|            2004 |                 1174.0729 |
|            2005 |                 1062.4770 |
|            2006 |                 1003.2622 |
|            2007 |                 1473.9489 |
|            2008 |                 1862.2267 |
|            2009 |                 3575.2941 |
|            2010 |                 3447.3158 |
|            2011 |                 6024.9000 |
|            2012 |                 8707.6667 |
+-----------------+---------------------------+

Get average word count of posts per year:

drop table if exists word_counts;
create temporary table if not exists word_counts
SELECT `ID`, `post_date`,
SUM( LENGTH(`post_content`) - LENGTH(REPLACE(`post_content`, ' ', ''))+1) AS 'Wordcount'
FROM `wp_posts`
WHERE `post_status`='publish'
GROUP BY `ID`
ORDER BY `post_date` DESC;
SELECT YEAR(post_date), AVG(Wordcount) FROM `word_counts` GROUP BY YEAR(post_date);
+-----------------+----------------+
| YEAR(post_date) | AVG(Wordcount) |
+-----------------+----------------+
|            2003 |       148.3052 |
|            2004 |       147.6809 |
|            2005 |       112.4611 |
|            2006 |       105.3289 |
|            2007 |       161.6875 |
|            2008 |       218.9600 |
|            2009 |       451.3529 |
|            2010 |       450.3158 |
|            2011 |       673.8714 |
|            2012 |      1017.6667 |
+-----------------+----------------+