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Part of the impetus for writing this post has been driven by the updates at A new Observable | Observable, which I recently wrote about Large Observable Update :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net, and looking at changes in not only Observable, but updates to D3 by Observable. These current and not-too-distant updates have had me thinking about what I could do with some of my blogging data to make interactive charts and graphs. I’ve recently moved a lot of my legacy static charts and graphs to Plotly to gain interaction with them, for many of my own uses. But, in the process of getting a decent data workflow setup for my site (and my notes data) I have relatively clean data locally ready for use and testing.
A Little Data Workflow BackgroundFor this blog I have been pulling down the data from the site’s backend and converting it with a set python script to extract it to SQLite, which is relational but quite fast for reading data and is great for single user write and a few read options. Over the past few months I’ve also been building many data analytics and data visualization prep python scripts (some building JSON files for standalone webpage interfaces). I’ve used Claude to debug, but also just turn out a script in less than couple minutes for the page setup for the D3 or Plotly scripts, which would usually take me 30 to 120 minutes. Once the scripts are set and I’ve reviewed them it is all just setting python flags and minor tweaks to the script to handle a data update.
With these script setups I’ve been able to try quite a few D3 chart and graph options very quickly. Going through the Python code, the data structures for the visualizations, and the hooks for the visualization and I’m rather happy with it for quick outputs.
What Can I See Using Blaugust DataOne of the things I had interest in from my A Wrap to Blaugust / Blaugust run in August was what did all of that look like from a basic statistic and graphical perspective. A few months back I created and ran a bunch of Jupyter queries and visualizations, Personal Blog Data Analysis - Looking at 25 Years. Since then I’ve been thinking about looking at a monthly view with more interactive charts and graphs. Since I had a decent amount of data from August 2026, existing data workflows, and a few D3 charting and graphing options I could work with I took a look.
August Off the Top Force GraphThe first is an interactive forced graph with the blogpost as orange nodes with the size corresponding to word count and the tethered edges link to categories for the post. Clicking on the post will show the related categories and pulling on the post node will start to see the other tethered posts connected through the categories. There are few toggles: 1) Posts and categories or just Posts with their related interconnections; 2) Only show shared categories (a category with more than one post); 3) Post to Time, which may be my favorite view, as it take the graph and lays out the posts left (oldest) to right (most recent), with a small light timeline at the bottom and all the other relationships displayed as well; 4) Post titles, which clutters things a bit and adding the toggle resolved that clutter.
You can view this standalone interactive web chart that sits in the Lab :: Off the Top Analytics at the direct link: Off the Top, August Force Graph with Toggles. A sample is here:
August 2026 Word CountsAs I was going through the data for August 2026 I knew and could see the word counts for posts, which I don’t have easily (nor quickly) available on my site. But, with the data local in SQLite and I’ve been using the local data to run many types of post analytics, word counts become a simple and quick option that doesn’t impact the site’s performance at all.
I was really curious about word counts per post across August, but also was more curious about a cumulative word count across the month as well. A quick and easy bar chart and line graph solved this, both having interactive hovers for metadata. August had 25,390 words posted.
The standalone interactive web chart is also in the Lab and the direct link is: Off the Top, August Word Counts by Post and Cumulative Count. A sample is here:
Cumulative Word Count for 2001 to 2026Looking at the cumulative count for August 2026 (the 25,390 words posted in the month) I had no idea what that count was in comparison to the whole life span of the blog (under this CMS that started in late October 2001 and not including the static posts prior to that). I know that in the early months and years of the blog I wrote a lot of short posts and the posts were frequent. Looking at word count I wasn’t expecting the first two or three years to have roughly the same growth slope up to 2008.
Looking across 25 years of posts I knew a single post analysis was going to be a bit rough for an interactive standalone webpage. Monthly would be better, but could still be a bit too much to process dynamically in the browser. Quarterly, was just a bit on the thin side and more difficult to see trend shifts and correlative line slope. I settled on a two-month interval and I had something interesting in under a minute.
July and August 2026 were the highest word count across all time on this blog. The 25 thousand words is roughly a quarter of a 250 page book. But, now that I had the bi-monthly chart I can also see the early years I had roughly similar counts per two months up until 2008 and then there was the “great flattening”, until the “great pandemica” lockdown when things ticked up again until lockdown ease and work went back to its normal patterns.
I ended up over the 25 years with 437,417 cumulative words just on this blog. That is roughly 4 books of 250 pages. It would be a rather odd book, but in just considering word count as the focus. I find word counts odd, particularly writing to word counts. I’ve had a regular column in tech publication that had a 750 rough word count topic, this was at a time when my posts were often 1,000 to 1,250 words on average and 750 words was about where I had the framing set to get to the meat of things. I mostly write on this blog to an amount where there aren’t good words left, which is 200 at times to 2,500 or more. To see my writing shifts in the early years roughly similar in trajectory rather interesting.
The standalone interactive web chart is also in the Lab and its direct link is: Off the Top All-time Cumulative Word Count. A sample is here:
Will this Continue?Now that these are standalone webpage charts and graphs, I’m not sure what I will do. I need to get the templates consistent from a layout and design perspective. But, once the standalone webpage is created I just copy it to the Lab or other location, and this can be automated with a quick script. I think the month-by-month analytic is interesting, at least to me. I have not only the local standalone version that I posted, but a rough output build that isn’t fully self-contained that I can play with and iterate on.
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I seem to have left pieces of myself scattered around the internet. This is my attempt to pull some of those pieces together.