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Site Tweak: Story Counts Share This on LinkedIn   Share This on Google   Tweet This   Forward This

27 February 2019

Last August we wrote a little Perl script to run inside a Keyboard Maestro macro on our laptop to count the stories we've published during the month. It does more than count stories, counting the kind of story, adding up Horn items, totaling published images (plus stories with images) and calculating percentages, too.

We've found it useful for giving us a snapshot of what is going on here. And encouraging a balanced editorial load, as it were.

But recently we've found those stats useful at parties, too.

That's because the best questions to ask at parties are ones that have numbers for answers.

You know the best questions to ask at parties are ones that have numbers for answers.

"How long has it been?" Just to name one example.

So when a few people recently asked us how Photo Corners is doing, we just popped off with the total number of stories we've published in this short month.

"Sixty-two so far this month," we reported.

"Wow!"

We succumbed to thinking about that. It didn't take long to realize it isn't easy for anyone else to see how much we've been doing.

Sure, everything is on the headline page. But how many Horn items have we published? How many images? How many obits? How many reviews?

The site, we decided, could us an odometer.

So we repurposed our Perl script (which includes a good deal of Unix command line stuff (ls, grep, find) as a CGI and linked it to our masthead's tag line on the headline page right where it says "Published frequently."

We did try it with a fancy CSS icon with an equals sign but we thought that was too obscure. So we stuck to a text link (with a helpful little tooltip).

So now you too can get the current stats. You no longer have to wait for the totals we publish in our archive story at the beginning of the next month. Running totals are now just a click away.


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