Occam's Razor

Time flies when you are having fun blogging. This is my 500th entry.

You are probably thinking that this is not that big a deal. Many blogs make it to 500 entries, and some in only a few months. Some blogs like Eschaton/Atrios put out a dozen entries or more a day.

Ah, but Occam’s Razor is not your ordinary blog. It has delusions to be something more. It aspires to offer unique content worth the time it took me to write it, and the time it took you to read it. You will not find many pithy, short or badly spelled entries here. Sadly, the latter are rather typical of the blogosphere. If TV is a vast wasteland, so is the blogosphere. Finding nuggets of interesting stuff can be challenging. This blog aspires to be one of the good nuggets that will always be easy to find.

What you get here are eclectic essays with no running theme. To date I offer 500 individual essays carefully written over 3 years and a few months. However, until today I did not quantify just how many words this amounts to. The result (not including today’s entry) is 541,766 words, or an average of 1086 words per entry. This explains, in case you were curious, why I tend to skip a day (sometimes more) between entries. Because a typical entry is 2-3 pages long and since each entry is edited four times before I will publish it, this amounts to a lot of time, thought and effort for a guy with a full time job.

If my blog were a book, and if the average entry were two typewritten pages long, the book would be over 1000 pages long. How big a book is that? Well, Tolstoy’s War and Peace is 1472 pages. I have become a self-published author, of sorts. You cannot find this collection of essays at Barnes & Noble, nor even on Amazon.com. If I thought that there was a market for my essays, perhaps I would publish it. After all, the blogger Riverbend who blogs from Baghdad had her entries turned into a book. To start, I would be satisfied just to pay back my hosting costs. Maybe I should add a PayPal donation link and see if anyone sends me some loose change.

(For those who are terminally bored, you can run this PHP script I created today which provides my current word counts.)

Near the start of 2006, I published this entry looking at my overall statistics for 2005. Since I started metering this site with SiteMeter around March 2004, and since this is the end of the month, this entry also gives me the opportunity to compare my SiteMeter statistics with those from a year ago.

Here is a snapshot yearly SiteMeter statistics for the last 12 months:

In addition, here is last year’s snapshot from exactly one year ago:

I will need to wait until January 2007 to get a clearer idea of how much traffic my blog is really getting, since SiteMeter statistics are not very accurate. However, based on my SiteMeter statistics, visits are up about 17% from the previous 12 months and page views are up 28%. Most likely, there was more growth than SiteMeter can track. Some people are accessing this site as a newsfeed. Although I cannot quantify it yet, access to this site via newsfeed continues to grow. Unfortunately, SiteMeter can only meter content in HTML and Javascript. However, services like FeedBurner can track newsfeed requests, providing visitors use their service to access my newsfeed. Since March 20th I have started using FeedBurner to track RSS subscriptions. Over time, this will give me an additional useful metric. I am sure though that I have a number of people getting my RSS and Atom newsfeeds the old fashioned way.

I hope that I can keep it up for 500 more entries, and that the next 500 will be at least as interesting as the first 500.