ezyang’s blog

Here is to celebrate a year of blogging. Thank you all for reading. It was only a year ago that I first opened up shop under the wings of Iron Blogger. Iron Blogger has mostly disintegrated at this point, but I’m proud to say that this blog has not, publishing thrice a week, every week (excepting that one time I missed a post and made it up with a bonus post later that month), a bet that I made with myself and am happy to have won.

Where has this blog gone over the year? According to Google Analytics, here were the top ten most viewed posts:

1. Graphs not grids: How caches are corrupting young algorithms designers and how to fix it
2. You could have invented zippers
3. Medieval medicine and computers
4. Databases are categories
5. Design Patterns in Haskell
6. Static Analysis for everday (not-PhD) man
7. MVC and purity
8. Day in the life of a Galois intern
9. Replacing small C programs with Haskell
10. How to use Vim’s textwidth like a pro

There are probably a few obscure ones that are my personal favorites, but I’ve written so many at this point it’s a little hard to count: including this post, I will have published 159 posts, totaling somewhere around 120,000 words. (This figure includes markup, but for comparison, a book is about 80,000 words. Holy cow, I’ve written a book and a half worth of content. I don’t really feel like a better writer though—this may be because I’ve skimped on the “revising” bit of the process.)

This blog will go on a brief hiatus for the month of January. Not because I wouldn’t be able to produce posts over the holidays (given the chance, I probably would... in fact, this was a kind of hard decision to make) but because I should spend a month concentrating the bulk of my free time on stuff other than blogging. Have a happy New Years, and see you in February!

Postscript. Here is the SQL query I used to count:

select
  sum( length(replace(post_content, '  ', '')) - length(replace(post_content, ' ', ''))+1)
from wp_posts
where post_status = 'publish';

There's probably a more accurate way of doing it, but I was too lazy to write out the script.