100th blog post!

This is my 100th post to this blog! And there’s a lot more where that came from!

Token graphage:

A domain change (formerly: assistedsilicon.blogspot.com), a platform change (Blogger to WordPress), 805.5 themes, and coming on two years later, the topics are mostly the same:

Linux: vim config, bash aliases, useful scripts, hidden options, and lots more
MySQL: How to do things you will likely need to do, and do them better
Python: Resources, recipes, and tricks for using this incredible language
Vista: How to live with it, partially
Occasional other tech/geek items

On the graph:

The nine month lacuna in 2007-08 is to be blamed on World of Warcraft.
The spike near the end of 2008 corresponded to when I started using Windows Vista (at work, under duress). Discoveries do seem to increase in wartime…

For some reason I couldn’t wrangle my data into a graph I liked in OO Spreadsheet. So, of course, I made the graph in Python! To get the post data, I ran this against my WordPress MySQL DB:

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mysql -u root -p -e "use WORDPRESS_DB; \
select date(post_date) as date, post_title as title from wp_posts \
where post_type='post' and post_status='publish' \
group by post_date order by date(post_date) asc;" > posts.csv

This grabs the dates and titles for all actual published posts, grouping and ordering them on the date. Then I put that output file into a short ugly script for graphing:

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#!/usr/bin/env python
try:
from pylab import *
except:
graphing = False
import pprint
import datetime

# Read in the file of titles and dates:
f = open('posts.csv')
flines = []
for line in f: flines.append(line.split('\t'))
# Create dict of year-month and counts therein:
date_counts = {}
for line in flines:
if date_counts.has_key(line[0][0:7]):
date_counts[line[0][0:7]] += 1
else:
date_counts[line[0][0:7]] = 1
# Make a list of the counts, dates and sort them:
counts = date_counts.items()
counts.sort()
# Turn the partial date strings into date objects for graphing:
dates = [key for key, value in counts]
dated_days = []
for day in dates:
year = int(day[0:4])
month = int(day[5:7])
day = 1
date = datetime.date(year, month, day)
dated_days.append(date)
counts = [ value for key, value in counts]
# Set labels
x = xlabel('Date')
setp(x, fontweight='bold')
y = ylabel('Posts')
setp(y, fontweight='bold')
# Subplot to handle date positioning
ax = subplot(111)
labels = ax.get_xticklabels()
setp(labels, fontweight='bold', rotation=30, fontsize=10)
# Plot as dates
plotted = plot(dated_days, counts, '--')
setp(plotted, marker='s')
title('Posts over time')
grid(True)

Latest version in my Code Trac.

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