Monthly Archives: September 2004

Noreascon

Why do I not hear about these things until it’s too late? This year, the world science fiction convention is being held in Boston: Noreascon. This only happens in Boston sporadically – apparently it’s been 15 years since the last one, and the previous ones were nine years apart each. It started yesterday and runs through Monday, but it costs upwards of $50 per day to attend, or $200 for the whole convention. But wow – they’re holding the Hugo Awards here, and such notables as Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman will be there.

Speaking of Neil, I didn’t even realize this thing was going on in Boston until I read the first line of his blog entry from yesterday! I mean, I read it every day, and I know that he’s always talking about conventions he is going to attend, but I had no clue it was in Boston until now! Gahh!

I guess I’ll sign up for his author tracker – maybe they will actually be a bit more specific about his actual plans. 🙂

Too bad I can’t qualify as press to receive a press pass. 🙁

Blog Posting Stats

So the other day I was thinking, “Self, this blog thing you post to is just a front-end to a ***MySQL|http://www.mysql.com/*** database. You know MySQL, and you know how to massage data in MySQL. So why not do something fun with it?”

So I wrote a ***dynamic reporting app|http://prwdot.org/blog_report.php*** using PHP and MySQL, which shows up-to-the minute statistics on how many total posts exist for different months, days, and hours. It’s kind of fun to look back at the stats. For example, in March 2003, we had the most posts ever – 42! Why was that? Part of it may have been the short-lived “Picture of the Day’ feature we were doing at that point. Our lowest posting month was July of 2003. That month was full of travels, visits from friends and relatives, and other such things… so less posting there. Mondays and Tuesdays are our most popular days for posting, probably since we’ve just finished off the weekend. And 10 am is the most popular hour for posting… not sure why, though. 🙂

Some of these stats are already available on our ***archives|http://prwdot.org/?p=archives*** page, but others can only be had through custom coded queries. There’s more I could do – for example, break down the statistics based on who was doing the posting, or see if there is a correlation between the length of the post and the time or date.

I’ve also set up the script so that you can see the stats for other blogs on the prwdot.org domain. Enjoy!