Blaugust Tallies

It’s the last day of Blaugust, so I’ll now present my summary findings to the jury.

This is very convenient because it means I don’t have to write a post tonight. It’s like having a day off!

• 32 posts published in total
• 31 posts tagged for Blaugust
• Roughly 12,000 words published (not including this one)
• 65 git commits to the blog repository
• 66 new images added to the S3 bucket
• 20+ pre-generated header images unused
• 6.88 GB of image data transferred
• 46,937 total requests for image data
• ~3.5 GB of non-image data transferred*
• ~908,000 requests for non-image data*

* Rough guess because AWS Amplify doesn’t show totals

More subjective measurements:

• 13 posts rushed out the door
• 10 posts sticking to the original Blaugust writing plan
• 6 posts yanked directly from old, unfinished drafts
• 5 posts I definitely wouldn’t have published if it weren’t Blaugust
• 3 posts about nothing whatsoever
• 2 posts accidentally containing the same topic
• 2 posts I got unexpectedly emotional while writing

And the number of posts I might have published if it had been any other month but Blaugust? Maybe 4 or 5.

It would be interesting to compare these findings to last year’s, which turned out fairly similar to this one. I think last year I also started out trying to do one thing, immediately abandoned that plan, and winged it the rest of the way.

Incidentally, I setup a new Hugo taxonomy called “moods” so I can tag posts based loosely on my mood at the time of writing, so I can keep track of these sorts of subjective measurements.

It occurs to me I never used any Blaugust hashtags. Part of that was because there’s no universal standard way of tagging a blog post with a Twitter hashtag. All my blog tweets were automated and I didn’t have any way to inspect the blog post to see if it was Blaugust-related to add an appropriate hashtag.

Tagging and categorizing blog posts, incidentally, is a full-time job. Start early. And don’t forget your category links are permalinks too.