Published 2026-03-30
tag(s): #useless-facts #blogging #meta
Yesterday Day before yesterday, I realized I haven't posted in a while, not for lack of
things to say [1] but because it was a pretty unusual week, in terms of
activities, errands and whatnot.
And today we went out to a park and hiked 4 miles. This would have been nothing at certain
point of our life, but we haven't done something like this a long time, so we all are
tired.
Also the park wasn't close, but that was kinda the point (we wanted to drive for a bit). We
spent most of the Sunday gone from the house.
AND! for the last two days, I've been waking up earlier than usual and couldn't fall back to
sleep.
My brain is as fried as my body, so no "real" post today.
(And, update "today" when I finally publish this: yesterday I felt too tired and
couldn't finish even the "not really a post" post).
But, I did wonder, has it been ever more than a week between posts here? What's the usual
"post distance" or cadence I have? I can try to make this analysis using the
feed [2] or just the post files, and that seems simpler. So, C-x
j, and navigate to the directory with all the posts. There are 209 files, so happy
200th post to me, on checks files 2026-03-02. My first post was on 2024-07-23,
checking on a website that does calendar calculations (sorry, felt lazy):
Result: 588 days It is 588 days from the start date to the end date, end date included. Or 1 year, 7 months, 8 days including the end date. Or 19 months, 8 days including the end date.
So, 1 year and 7 months to 200 posts. Rounding 7 months to 30 days each, 365 + 210 = 575
days.
About 2.8 days in between posts. If I made a mistake...remember that my brain is fried.
But, speaking of tasks that I shouldn't be doing right now...
(...and that I couldn't finish yesterday, as I started falling asleep while typing...)
...the original impulse was to get the days between consecutive posts. Using the magic of
rectangle selections, I put on a buffer all dates only, and now to write some elisp:
(defun diff-to-prev ()
(interactive)
(let ((d1 (date-to-day (buffer-substring (pos-bol) (pos-eol))))
d2 date-diff)
(forward-line -1)
(setf d2 (date-to-day (buffer-substring (pos-bol) (pos-eol))))
(move-end-of-line 2)
(insert " " (number-to-string (- d1 d2)))
(forward-line -1)))
The reason I made the function interactive was to then invoke it repeatedly with a keyboard
macro. And since this is a one-use-only I didn't even bother with save-excursion
or docstrings or anything like that. I even made it go to the previous line after running, so
I didn't need that step in the macro. 😎
I tested the command, corrected a mistake, repeated that two more times... And then I followed
this sequence to start recording the macro, invoke the command, finish the macro, finally then
repeat it 250 more times (| is the step separator): C-x ( | M-x
diff-to-prev | C-x ) | C-200 C-x e.
With the list of dates, and days of difference, I can see that this 9 day gap isn't the biggest, there were two 14 days gaps: 2024-08-22 to 2024-09-05, and 2025-01-04 to 2025-01-18. Next longest is 11 days between 2025-02-21 and 2025-03-04.
I could find out the average words per post, or days of the week I publish more often, or most used tag, or...whatever. But it seems I don't care enough to do it. :D