An interesting question was posed to me today and I wanted to share it with you folks to get your thoughts. Is there an easy way to tell how many blog posts a person’s blog has?
With WordPress, it’s pretty simple (perhaps too simple). Wrapping each post is a div with the Post ID. The Post ID happens to be synonymous with the number of posts. Thanks autonumber! :). I’m a little surprised that this isn’t obfuscated a little.
Of course, this doesn’t take into consideration posts that you’ve deleted, but it’s a fairly close estimate.
With hosted blogging apps, like Blogger, it’s virtually impossible since the POSTID is assigned across all blogs:
blogID=20283310&postID=5610859732045586500
One of the easier means I use is to simply do a site search on Google. You can break down the year and how many posts are unique across the year:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://buzzmarketingfortech.blogspot.com/2007/
My apologies to Paul Dunay (great Marketing podcasts!) in advance. I can tell by the search, using the year, that Paul has 125 posts. He had 50 the year before and 32 thus far in 2008. Kind of sneaky, huh?
Got any simple ways where you can tell the number of posts on a blog across the other platforms?
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You could always run a Lynx command via a command tool to generate all the links found and then pipe it thru wc -l.
Kinda like using a hammer to push in a thumbtack. 🙂
My morning humor before I fall asleep at my keyboard, Barbara
Great post and great question Doug
Looks like I better get cranking on my blog!
Thanks for the mention
Hi Paul!
I needed a good blogger-based blog as an example and yours was top of mind.
It’s not about quantity – the quality of your posts and the time you take to edit and post them is evident!
Doug
Or — and I realize I don’t have any good solutions like Google searches and special Lynx commands — you could just look at the archives which shows the number of posts for each month/year, and total them up with a pencil and paper. 😀
Erik
Enter Douglas Karr: Cyber-Stalker!
j/k 😉
Just a note, there are several reasons MySQL might skip an autonumber so the post number is a maximum potential, not an exact number. Just FYI.
Good catch Doug, I hadn’t realised you could find out this way – so simple too!
If the blog has hidden the links to the archive and I want to test if it is a fairly new blog or not (or just a spam blog with few posts), I usually press the RSS button in my firefox browser to look at the feed. As the default for WordPress RSS posts is 10 (and often left untouched), any less posts than this on the feed will usually tell me this is a very new blog (and many spam blogs still have the ‘hello world’ there as the first post).
Totally untech I know. The ideas above are much more useful!