Twenty-six years of weblog posts, looked at sideways.
A boom, a long quiet, and a return to long-form.
Your posting cadence has three distinct eras. From 2000–2006 you wrote constantly — short posts, multiple a day, peaking at 499 in 2005. Then a long quiet stretch where Twitter and other platforms absorbed the daily thoughts. Since around 2018 you've come back to long-form on the blog, but the volume is much lower and each post does more work.
The quietest year on record was 2021 with just 5 posts. The busiest was 2005, with 499.
Median word count per post, by year.
The shape of a post in 2000 — a sentence or two pointing to something interesting — barely exists in 2025. In 2000, your median post was 57 words. In 2026, it's 1,042 words. The blog stopped being a notebook and became an essay column.
Top 30 tags across the whole archive.
Top tags by era. Each era has its own preoccupations.
Early blog era
Quiet years
The long-form return
The early era is unmistakably bloggy: links, foofery, peeves, weblogs. The middle years are dominated by the links tag (33.6% of posts) — that's the daily-linkdump habit at its peak. The recent era reads like a different magazine entirely: travel, technology, cars, reviews, howto.
Top 15 tag co-occurrences. These pairs reveal recurring beats.
internet + peeves is the most frequent pair (53 times) — a tidy summary of about 60% of your output. foofery + politics and foofery + internet both show up too: classic AWLN snark.
A timeline of cultural arrivals, dated by their first post.
Half the tags here are products that didn't exist until a few weeks before they showed up — iPhone in August 2008 (a few weeks after the App Store launched), twitter three months later, EV in April 2015 right when Tesla expanded the Model S, vibe coding in February 2026. The blog functions as a personal cultural register.
| 2004-W45 | 22 |
| 2005-W17 | 21 |
| 2022-W44 | 20 |
| 2004-W46 | 19 |
| 2000-W12 | 18 |
| 2005-W05 | 17 |
| 2018-W32 | 17 |
| 2000-W10 | 16 |
2004-W45 was the week of the Bush–Kerry election. 2022-W44 lined up with the Twitter takeover and your shift back to blogging.
Tuesdays edge out everything; weekends are about 35% slower than weekdays.
Top 10 by word count. The big essays.
| 5,121 | 2012-03-16 | My Webstock Talk: Lessons from a 40 year old (now with transcript) |
| 3,838 | 2003-10-04 | Blogging for Dollars |
| 3,704 | 2021-06-15 | Tips on buying a used Sprinter van |
| 3,066 | 2016-10-06 | Part 3: Talkabot conference liveblog |
| 3,029 | 2025-12-16 | A 2,200 mile EV test drive *from Texas to Oregon* |
| 2,923 | 2022-12-07 | How to be a writer on a marketing team *without sounding like a jerk* |
| 2,834 | 2025-12-03 | Everything I've learned about homeowner's insurance, natural disasters, and recovery aid *in 2025* |
| 2,806 | 2014-12-22 | Ten Years of Podcasting: Fighting Human Nature |
| 2,687 | 2012-07-02 | My trip to Italy |
| 2,618 | 2014-05-21 | On the Future of MetaFilter |