How many words? Whither Blog Drafts?

My first blog post was 23 years, 8 months, 25 days ago. This blog has 799,750 words, which would take about 73 hours and 50 minutes to read.

I’ve been playing with aggregate data on this blog for a while. I like to see what it all adds up to. The above sentences are dynamic. They will be up-to-date as long as this is a dynamically powered website.

They work because I added a WordPress [shortcode] to this post. It runs some code that queries the database and creates the resulting sentences.

My theme is and has been written by me. It’s not something you can download. It is pretty specific but I’ve been considering extricating those parts which are very specifically about me and making it public in GitHub. But for now, no.

But last night at the IndieWeb HomeBrew Website Club meeting I decided to share some of the current code into a gist: [on gist.github.com].

I get a lot of inspiration from these meetings, and last night was great. I was reminded that I have on my calendar a periodic event that reminds me to Revisit Blog Drafts.

I don’t like seeing a high number in the drafts tab inside WordPress. 9 is okay. 15 is no good. And as long as I go back to them every so often I feel okay. Like any TODO list if you don’t interact with the list it’s intent wasted.

Last night I also was reminded that at one time I had the idea for myself to blog to the future–to write posts which would not be suitable to share now–but I felt were important. Maybe about something I’m angry about. I had a few posts like that but ultimately I deleted them after seeing them over time. They came to seem like unexploded bombs. If something went wrong with my WordPress site, or if a database backup somehow leaked, I would not want them to be public now. So I let that idea go. Probably I got the idea from too much fiction where some Executor reads a Will to a crying family airing grievances at them. It’s just not me, that sort of long-view spite.

I’m having fun working on my website, even if it would take a long time to read. And I dig the IndieWeb community.

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