Times & Seasons will today welcome its 100,000th visitor. Since we started our web counter shortly after we opened last November, we’ve grown from 8 daily visits to 900. To mark the 100,000 visitor milestone, I spent some time trying to figure out how much writing has been produced in our seven month stint.
The Times & Seasons writers have posted 862 separate entries for a total word count of 405,000. The Times & Seasons community has written 15,849 comments and, based on a sample of 1264 comments, the average comment has around 140 words. That means the comments measure a whopping 2,218,000 words. The total T&S production – entries plus comments – is about 2,623,000 words. If we were a novel, we’d be 10,500 pages long!
By comparison, the Book of Mormon has 275,000 words; the KJV Bible has 783,000. The T&S total is more than double the length of the standard works. (Writing is so much easier now that we don’t have to use scrolls and metal plates.)
Thank you to all of the visitors and participants who make Times & Seasons a place to discuss and to think and to learn. May we all be better because of it.
reading times and seasons has really made me thin.
I’m glad it is here. I don’t really read much else in the blogernacle on a regular basis- but whenever I do it makes me think I want to start a blog.
But what the heck would I write about?
I wish reading T&S made me thin!
Impressive. Of course with Gary Cooper now on board as a full-timer at Doctrinal:net, it should only take a few more of his characteristically lengthy posts and we’ll probably have 405,000 words too! :-)
Let me add my thanks to Matt’s. And Mike, I really want to know about the T&S weight loss program. Can you imagine the number of visitors we would get if we could promise Gospel discussion and weight loss?!
By the way, when we started this, some people wondered how long it would take before we were pulled aside by our bishops or stake presidents and encouraged to consider other avocations. So far, I am in the clear. Anyone else have encounters?
One final note: dp, don’t you think that it’s time to add T&S back to your blogroll? I mean, you just added one of our Top 10 comment leaders as a blogger, so we can’t be all that bad, right?
I was just thinking yesterday that Times and Seasons is the most interesting blog in the Bloggernacle — has the best posts, most interesting commentary, etc.
Congrats on hitting the 100k mark!
Wow! You mean I have actually read the equivalent of that many pages?
(thinking wistfully of all the really good literature I could have read….)
Help me out. What is the definition used by the software for a visitor? Is each “visitor” a unique IP address per day? It surely can’t be each refresh.
Frank: SiteMeter does not count a refresh as a new visit. However, if you visit, leave, and then return again something like 30 minutes later, then I think you get counted as another visitor. Hence, the software no doubt overstates the number of unique visitors, since there are obviously lots of people who check in here a couple of times a day.
BTW, another interesting T&S factoid: the average visitor to T&S spends 10 minutes and 43 seconds on the site. An eternity in internet and blog time.
The pragram we use is a little quirky (though it’s free, so we put up with the quirks).
It’s not each refresh, but it’s not a daily count either. Site Meter counts a hit as a visit from an IP address, that has not visited in the past half hour. It’s a strange definition, I’ve always thought.
I.e., Nate visits the page at 10 am, clicks on a post at 10:05, browses through several other posts at 10:15, hits refresh to see his comments at 10:30, reads another post at 10:45 -> = 1 hit.
Nate visits the site at 10 am. He then works for six hours, and visits again at 4 pm -> = 2 hits.
Bottom line: It overcounts; I’m not sure exactly by how much, but it may be 20% or 30%.
Also, we didn’t have it properly installed on archived pages for the first several months of our existence, so we missed whatever visits to the archives happened then.
Thanks Kaimi and Nate.
Matt, how did you sample the comments? And, considering how many you sampled you certainly didn’t do it by hand. So why did you just do a sample if the computer was doing the work?
Also, I am curious if there is any apparatus that doesn’t involve pentagrams and goat’s blood by which we could get a unique visitors per month count. Or at least unique IP addresses.
There are also significant undercounts, however, as multiple readers who use a single IP address are counted as a single person.
When I was in law school, the school provided free dial-up Internet access. The server had around 400 ports, which means 400 people could dial into the server at any one time. All 400 of those ports would have shared the IP address of the server, and all 400 users would therefore look like a single visitor to SiteMeter.
and some overcounts, as i have a _work_ and a _home_ IP.
It’s better than CATS!
At BCC, Ryan Bell mentioned he was going on an all-Book-of-Mormon diet, and I queried whether one could lose weight that way.
Speaking of CATS —
I have another website, a board for enthusiasts of musicals, theater, and movies. There are only 13 registered users, but we have quite a record. I started the board April 6, and there are 19,105 total visits, 1841 total posts, 282 daily visits, and an average of 30 posts a day.
Just for comparison. Anybody is welcome to join us.
http://p069.ezboard.com/bsondheimandus
CATS came to Jonesboro, Arkansas a couple of months ago. It was a huge deal: the first time the touring company for a (former) Broadway show had ever visited Northeast Arkansas. I would have prefered it if it had been The Producers, but you know, you take what you can get.
Nate, thanks for being charitable in estimating how frequently the faithful log on here each day. A couple of times? I, and my employer, wish it were so.
Frank, I just now saw your request for information on how I counted the words in the comments. You were right that I didn’t do it by hand, but the only method available to me was still laborious. I randomly selected threads (by weighted average of number of comments) and pasted all of the thread’s comments into Word, then used its word count feature. Then I deducted the number of words the word-counter attributed to the attribution line (“Comment by Ryan Bell — 6/29/2004 : 2:48 pm”). I’m sure there’s a better way. I’ll have you help me when we reach 500,000 visitors.
FYI, Matt, b2evolution includes word counts as a standard feature (just for posts, I think).
FWIW, the SQL database shows that wp_comments has 39,346 entries (i.e., 39,000 comments) and the total space taken up by that table is 32.1 MB. (plus 87k in overhead, whatever that is).
If the SQL database is almost completely the text of comments that would imply that, for words+space average 6 bytes, we have about 5 million words. Also, our average comment took 800 bytes, which would be 130 words or so. That seems very long, so I’m guessing the database has some overhead to it, but who knows? This comment is 63 words.
I just noticed that in the post, Matt puts the average comment in his sample at 140 words. So I guess we really do talk that much.