I had one major New-Year’s resolution (though I had resolved it before then): post to my blog on average once per day. This sounds simple, but I don’t just want one post on each day. I’m happy to let my posting muse cycle between wordlessness and logorrhea. Therefore, if I post three things one day, I’m off scot free for the next two days. In practice, this gets pretty hard to keep track of. I’ve already started to find it difficult 23 days into the year.

However, I was able to remedy this with a little PHP and MySQL code. WordPress (this blogging software) runs on those technologies, and so it was trivial for me to tap into the database and produce this page. It does something very simple. It goes from the beginning of the year to the present day, tallying posts along the way, and dividing by the number of days in the year that have passed. This gives me a total post count and a ratio of posts to days. As you can see if you look at that page, I have been coasting for a little while, but was getting dangerously close to “1”. This post should remedy that, which is kind of cheating, but I’m willing to accept it.

Probably this could be dressed up into a widget or plugin or something, and anyone is welcome to use it to do that, but I have neither the time nor sufficient interest to learn how.
Here’s the PHP code, if you’re interested: postcountphp.gz (1 kB)

ADDENDUM: Updated 2008-01-26 to only count published posts.