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!