House of the Fierce [247]

Stormblood [4.0]: Post may contain potential spoilers.

House of the Fierce

So today I thought “Hey I think its about time to get a shot of Doman’s Resistance!” only to realize that there’s basically nothing of interest to take. Honestly, its kind’ve sad that there’s so little to look at. I suppose it would make sense, since this place was meant to be a hideout for the resistance. Even then the people are still there with huge rooms and not only that. Some of the areas are broken and the “courtyard” has a huge hole on top. The reason for mentioning that is because there appears to be no avenue for the water to escape from due to the place acting more of a cave. As such when it rains the whole place will experience a watery doom. So instead talking about doom and gloom. I decided to spend about 30 minutes to an hour on my blog word count stuff.

Word Count Shenanigans

Down below you will see a table listing the month/year and its amount of posts (excluding posts not part of Screenshot a Day). It will then have the total word count for the month and its average. Now before you read too far into the stats. I should mention that there are a few posts that probably have a huge impact for the averages per month. Unfortunately, I don’t want to spend time getting all of the numbers again to remove the outliers and try to get a more accruate number.

Fairly interesting information. I’m a little over 3/4 to reaching 100k total words for my blog. I also find it interesting that february was by far the worst month for my entire blog. To be quite honest, I hit a bit of a snag during that time. Which is funny considering the month before that had the highest word count and average. The only slight problem being that its hard to grasp visually what these numbers mean. Sure I can see what the numbers are in total, but it doesn’t help much beyond that. That’s why I made a quick graph for each month’s average word count! That way its easier to see whats going on.

Its kind’ve fascinating in a way to see my writing habits in a sense. As it stands now. March is on track to beat either July or January.

You know what? I’m kind’ve glad to see the results visually. It kind’ve inspires me to go beyond what I have done so far. I’ve only have roughly half a month left and I want to see if I can surpase either July or January. The only challenge with that desire, is that I need to invest more time in typing these posts and in turn figure out on what I want to say. Heck this might become a resurgence with my crazy story idea.

The Crux

While I’m glad for having been able to see these numbers. I’m also keenly aware of the fact that this could become a vicious cycle that would probably result in a similar instance to February. I don’t think there’s a lot of people out there talking about their word count per post. I think the most people will do is say what they typically do and don’t say or see much beyond that. Due to the nature of my blog. Word counts serves as a tool to get a glimpse of my state of mind or potential interest. Obviously, there’s a lot more in the picture than just word counts. Thats why I can’t just rely on this tool as an one-stop tracker to all of my progress. Its merely a way to visually demonstrate my work in a concise fashion.

I won’t deny that this may result in me wanting to push the word counts more than before. I just need to make certain that this tool doesn’t get the better of me. Some will say that word counts don’t matter and they aren’t wrong, but I want to make these posts longer in general. I don’t anyone is interested to read a 60 word post all of the time. I also must realize the fact that I can’t make incredibly long posts every day. Maybe I’ll try to do a few large posts every week.

Network Traffic

Random fact. I decided to check my network traffic logs with Goaccess after ignoring it for months. I was surprised to an extent by what I had saw. Now mind you the traffic logs are fairly inaccurate to real people visiting the website, but I can still use it as a tool to see how much traffic comes to my website.

The graph might be a pain to see since it covers January 12 to March 12, but I think you should be able to notice a clear spike in traffic between January 12 to January 19. Sadly, I couldn’t go back further since I had did a complete restart of the server and the log data is only kept temporarily by Goacess. Either way, lets look at whats special behind those days.

I was making my stories during that time, but towards the end of that period I had encountered a couple issues and in turn resulted in a significant drop in traffic. However, I kept making stories for a little while longer, so its hard to say what caused that sudden drop of traffic. Another jump in traffic I want to also point out is when I published my “Kugane Leap” Video. Now technically I posted the video on February 21st, but I didn’t make a reddit post to the ffxiv subreddit till past midnight. As such a sudden jump in traffic appeared on the next day.

It should also be noted that I tend to publish my posts close to midnight since I usually get off of work towards the end of the day. (Although, sometimes I create the post much earlier than normal. Like today I create this post a bit past midnight so that it qualified for a new day.) Oh yeah this is something I failed to mention. In July of last year. I tend to make the posts in the middle of the day right before work and then finish it afterwards when I get back. When I started focusing on creating the posts after work later in August. I think it could be a potential cause to my reduced average word count.

List of Projects

I mentioned a bit with my projects and the blog as a whole yesterday. Today I want to actually list out what my current projects are, regardless if they are active or not.

• Screenshot a Day (Active)
• Hydaelyn Preservation Project Videos (Inactive)
• Exploring the Realms (Slow Progress)
• Daily Stories (Inactive)
• Adding a Gallery (Slow Progress)

I currently have 4 projects in some form of state. Screenshot a day is obviously still very active, but is technically part of my overarching preservation project. The stupidly long videos I have made that was introduced with the project has been in a state of inactivity. Although, as mentioned multiple times. I’ve been wanting to get that project up and running again. Exploring the Realms has a few snags and honestly some of my interests aren’t fitting as well as I hoped. The daily stories idea might come back around, but I want to make some changes to it. The main reason being that when I bring it back, I want it to keep going. Lastly the whole Gallery idea is probably the most ambitious one and I don’t have a strong skill set in web design. As such its going to take some time for me to get some substantial progresss.

Some may ask why I’m doing this and honestly its more of a reminder for myself. It sort’ve helps to have a clear list of what I want/need to work on. I’m fairly confident that I can get another project back into a more active state again, but I really want to avoid burning myself out. February seems to be a strong indicator of burnout.

Today’s Conclusion

So yeah, that will be all for today. Honestly, I want to keep adding more to today’s post, but I’m starting to lose more thoughts than is being typed. Oh yeah, one last thing. I want to make the whole word count table a monthly thing. Although, I will have to look into some program or script to ease the task of making the graphs and tables.

Anyhow, I hope you folks have a good day/night!