I’ve been doing a fair amount of blogging in the last two years here and there, I’ve moved some stuff around, added some content that was pending. And somewhere in all of that, one of my “tools” stopped functioning. I had a word count plugin that wasn’t very good, and it even reached the stage where WordPress wondered if it was abandoned before it was updated recently.

So, I haven’t been keeping track of my word count overall between my two sites. I knew I was up there. I had hit 1.5M words quite some time ago, and I figured I was probably over 2M now easily. I had to be, right?

Today I did a quick dive to find a simple word count stats plugin to replace the old one, which is not as easy as it sounds. There are lots of REALLY complicated ones out there, but I don’t want all that extra bloat. I just want the basic stats.

Basic stats

For the number of posts, I have 1591 here at ThePolyBlog, although 26 are still in draft. PolyWogg has another 147 with 3 in draft, although that will likely increase as I revamp that site a bit more and add some regular blogging posts about HR or astronomy. If I add in pages, I get 21 at ThePolyBlog and 41 over at PolyWogg, for a grand total of 1691 posts, 29 drafts, and 62 pages (mostly for the HR guide like info). I still need to trim some of that, but that’s not bad. Nothing super exciting in there, although I’ll be intrigued when I hit 2000 active posts.

Another stat shows up, it’s categories — 15 at ThePolyBlog and 10 at PolyWogg, but the PolyWogg ones will reduce in the short term. Both sites have a huge number of tags used, 1239 (TPB) + 1403 (PW) gives me 2642 overall, but I’m phasing out some of that work and reducing my use of tags for a lot of the newer posts.

I have comments tracked as well, with 260 at TPB and 479 at PW for a total of 739. It’s not the best of indicators though as lots of people just email me direct, which doesn’t show up in those stats at all. Nor do comments on FB or Twitter. It’s a sign of engagement, and I wish more comments were made directly on the site, but well, that’s not what my followers do.

The big stat

For wordcount, almost the entire total is me. Andrea has two guest blogs and we’ll add another few in the next couple of weeks, but that’s only 3765 off my total at the moment.

For PolyWogg, my guess was somewhere in the 400-500K range. Nope, I’m up to 687,752 words. Almost three quarters of a million, and set to grow as I upload my new version of the HR guide. Some of those words will overwrite some existing temporary text, so hard to say how much it will grow by as I do. I should reach 700K by January though, and possibly closer to 725K.

The real surprise was ThePolyBlog. I estimated I was at 1.5/1.6M based on previous estimates and earlier counts. I changed a few things around, sure, plus I’ve been blogging a lot. I was surprised to see that TPB is up to 1,830,374 words. 1.8M all on its own.

What does that mean for a combined total? It means I blew past 2M and hit the next milestone…

2,518,026 words!

Holy crap. I thought I had probably surpassed 2M, I had no idea that I’m now over 2.5M. I missed both milestones!

Man, I’m wordy.