5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 4

This article is the fourth (and final) one in my series about having blogged continuously for five years. I discuss the process of collecting my blogging data and reporting them in tables and graphs, but this time, the process differs from the quartile methodology that I cover in Part 2. That article emphasizes spread of word counts, and this article emphasizes high/low word counts and distribution over 10 word-count intervals.

The top pixstrip shows a table with the basic information that I put in Excel for creating the column graph. In the table, the first column lists the word count divisions, and the second column lists the number of articles for each word count category. In the graph, the word count divisions are in the x axis, and the numbers of articles are in the y axis, represented by the blue 3D columns.

The distribution and percentages of articles show that the largest group of my articles ranged from 400 to 499 words—27, a smidge more than 20%. Combined with the other three largest groups (range from 400 to 799 words), my articles totaled 82, 63.1% of the 130 articles over five years time, from September 2009 through August 2014.

In the three previous articles that I wrote about blogging for five years, I listed various steps for collecting information and generating visual results. For bloggers and other interested parties who might want to create your own similar info, the basic steps are as follows (also noted in Part 3 of my series):

1. In Excel, log the article titles.
2. Open each article, and copy/paste verbiage into MS Word, noting the word count at Word's lower left corner.
3. In Excel, copy the word count number into the cell adjacent the appropriate article title.

You might want to insert empty rows to separate significant time periods. You might even copy the set to another spot before putting in separators.

The following pixstrip shows the Excel window for sorting, and the partial image of the Period A sorted table. The Excel window opens after clicking Data tab > Sort and clicking Add Level for obtaining a second sort criterion. At the table, I added reddish outlines at the highest and lowest word counts.

The following image shows high and low word counts for periods A through E, with red outlines at the absolute lowest and highest word count numbers.

It might seem odd that I place the graphing process pixstrip before the other images. Usually, my images are sequential. For this article, the results image is more eye-catching at the very top. FYI, my tools in my series have been Excel, MS Word, Windows 7 Snipping Tool, and my ancient PaintShopPro 7.04.

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Links to the series

1. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 1
   Focus on single- and five-year views for total articles, articles with images, and recipe articles.
2. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 2
   Focus on numbers of words in articles and graphical representations.
3. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 3
   More details on collecting the data.
4. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 4
   Emphasis on data sorting and distribution of word count groupings.