Wednesday, November 30, 2011

It Was Also Bravestarr's Horse

I did it! Thirty posts in thirty days over the course of November. I didn't think I'd actually manage it, and only have done so through a slight bit of cheating and bending of the rules. I think the idea is to post daily, but I missed that on two occasions. Despite that, I did get in the thirty posts within the allotted month.

This only stands as a personal achievement. I didn't raise money for a cause or make anyone's lives better because of what I wrote (not that I'm aware of anyway). My friend Cian took part in Movember and raised money for prostate cancer awareness. His was a much better cause, all told. To alleviate my guilt, I donated to his cause. Also, he had a smashing 'tash.

But I'm proud of what I did. The quality of posts meandered a bit, sliding below the imaginary average level this blog aspires to maintain. There were funny posts, nostalgic posts and far too many posts about video games! It started with an angry letter to Google and finished with some thoughts on the value of living. But they were all fun to write. Once or twice I arrived home from work without a single idea on what to post that evening. I would just turn on the laptop and start typing. Those often turned out to be my favourites.

Now that it's all done, you might be interested in some facts:

  • I recorded 1,684 page views from November 1st to 30th across the entire blog, not all for the new material, but there was a marked jump from the 700 view per month I've been averaging since June. 
  • Taken as they stand, my total word count is an astonishing 14,948 words, averaging just short of 500 words per post (498.26), peaking at 1,723 and dipping as low as 112.
  • If you removed the cut'n'pasted poem from my post on the 5th of November (which I obviously didn't write, nor had to retype) from the count, it stands at 14,873, or an average of 495.76 words per post, peaking at 1,723 and dipping as low as 37 in the altered post.
  • The median word count was 419.
  • There were 10 comments left.
  • Currently, the highest viewcount for a single post is 86, for the very first post. Second place has 32 views.
  • There are 22 images and one video
  • The instances of blatant disregard toward the conventions for the proper use of italics and bolding must number somewhere in the hundreds.
  • Occurrences of spelling and grammatical errors are similarly numbered.

I had a lot of fun completing my 30/30 (now you should get the title's reference, if you hadn't before this). Hopefully I'll try it again next year and compare the results.

How were they to read? Generally boring? Too long? Painful to view on account of the previously mentioned disregard for literary conventions? Feel free to let me know in the comments.

And thanks for reading.

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