200!

Milestones are always fun, and we've hit a big one today on The Beautiful Hypothesis – this is my 200th post! As I've tended to do in previous milestone posts, here's some handy statistics and fun facts about this blog.

• It's been 582 days since post #1, making my posting rate 0.34 posts per day, or about one every three days. That's rather higher than I thought, and I'm very gratified to know that I'm just about hitting my original target.
  
• The most common label I've used on my posts is "picture of the week", with 52 entries (oddly enough). Following closely behind is "internet" with 26. Good to see I've got my priorities right.
  
• The word count for all posts, including titles and datestamps (but not including this post), is 104,525. In 12pt Times New Roman, this takes up 181 A4 pages.
  
• The most popular post (by page views) is What's in your wallet?, my step-by-step dissection of a debit card. Over 20% of my visitors read that post, considerably more than even see the front page.
  
• Phrases that my visitors have used to get to this blog include "funny badgers", "risc perfume for man", "hypothesis town services switzerland", "is the phrase 'yesterday morning' right" (I think it probably is, personally), "welsh translation of marseillaise" and "belinda carlisle satanica".

I could go on, but I think instead I will continue to the reason I didn't make this post a couple of days ago – I was working on this blog's newest feature! If you're a remotely regular reader of this blog, you'll know that I tend to go on a bit. I've been looking for a good solution for micro-blogging, or tumblelogging as it's sometimes known, so that I could stick short musings or observations online without going to the bother of making a whole new post.

I briefly considered Twitter, but the problem with services like that is privacy. If I suddenly decide that I don't want my posts up on Twitter any more, I have no guarantee that the owners won't keep them around on disk for years to come. Given the encroaching commercialisation of Facebook that we've seen in the last few years, too, I felt that I really needed to be able to control the posting completely.

Now that I have Ballpoint Banana running, and now that my Python coding skills are at a slightly less amateurish level (technically speaking, I'm a professional developer!), I decided that the thing to do was to develop my own blogging engine. So I'm very happy to announce the launch of Breezeblog, the simplest and most lightweight micro-blogging solution known to man.

To read my posts with the default settings, just make your merry way to this page. There aren't many posts up there yet, but once there are you will be able to read the archives from the settings page.

That page also gives you access to the RSS feed, and thanks to the wonders of Yahoo Pipes I can also offer a combined Beautiful Hypothesis and Breezeblog feed. So now you can stay completely up to date with anything that I write, and can also shake your head sadly in disbelief at the rampaging torrent of geekishness that is my life.