13 Years of Ziff

Note: This post is straight-up navel gazing. Consider yourself warned.

This month marks 13 years since I wrote my first post at ZD. That post was about asking for change in the Church. If you think I’ve been blogging about the same thing over and over for a long time, you’re pretty much right.

One thing that I think has changed in my blogging is that over time, I’ve shifted from more blogging about numbers-related stuff to more blogging that’s just plain silliness. I definitely still enjoy looking at Mormon (or Mormon-adjacent) data and trying to find an interesting pattern in it to write about. But I guess I’ve found that I also very much enjoy writing goofy parodies of Mormon stuff, or rewriting things to make them Mormon-ish. And silly blogging has the added benefit of being much less labor-intensive than stats blogging is. Rather than spending potentially dozens of hours on a post, I can spend maybe one or two. Also, as much as I try to make the numbers-based stuff approachable, I suspect that silly blogging has the potential to connect with more people, as humor is more generally shared than a love of numbers is.

The larger context of ZD and the Bloggernacle have also changed. I think when I first started blogging, after my sisters and their friends had started the blog months before, I was a little more intimidated by my surroundings, both on this blog and on the Bloggernacle more generally. To fit in well, I wanted to say important and well-thought-out things, and working with numbers felt like it gave me the chance to make something I wrote important and well-thought-out, as I’m often better with data than I am with prose. In contrast to those first few years, now that ZD has been around a while, our place in the Bloggernacle is pretty firmly established as decidedly heretical backwater. We’re also much quieter than we used to be, with many of us bloggers moving on to Heavenly Mother status (although I hold out hope that at least some of those moves might yet be temporary). In this context, I feel more comfortable that the  hundreds dozens of readers who are still here (thank you for sticking with us!) kind of know what to expect, and have made peace with our quirks. So I’m more willing to let my silliness show, and to dash off a quick goofy post and put it up than I ever would have been in our earlier days.

But let’s look at the data, shall we? I’ve written 243 posts in 13 years, or about one and a half a month. In one way, that feels like not very many, as I suspect that it’s no more than a month or two’s work for a serious blogger like Ardis. But in another way, it feels like a ton, just because there have been so many posts that I thought about and agonized over and rewrote so many times.

I went back and put all of them into one of four categories: numbers, silly, other church, and other non-church. Of the 243, 90 (37%) fell into numbers, 49 (20%) into silly, 96 (40%) into other church, and 8 (3%) into other non-church. So I’ve written almost twice as many numbers-based posts as silly posts. But in the past few years, as I had suspected, I’ve flipped and written more silly posts. Since the beginning of 2017, I’ve written more silly posts (26) than numbers-based (16) or other church (17). Here’s a graph that shows the percentage by type across time.

Once I had the data in a spreadsheet, I thought it might be fun to look at a few more breakdowns by time. This next graph shows how many posts I’ve written each year.

I really blogged much less in the heyday of ZD, and then I’ve blogged quite a bit more in the past few years as it’s been in decline. I’m actually somewhat heartened to see this, as I’ve made a conscious decision to blog more to try to keep the blog at least somewhat alive as many of my co-bloggers have had changes in circumstances that led them to step away. I only hope that my increased blogging hasn’t been a factor in chasing my co-bloggers away. (It hasn’t, has it? Guys? Guys??)

I was also curious to see in which months I’ve posted the most.

The major pattern here seems to be that I get lazy in the late summer and then I’m re-invigorated in the fall. I guess this kind of matches the academic schedule that I was on for many of the years that I’ve been blogging.

Here is the breakdown by day of the week.

I’ve blogged least on the weekends. This follows the overall pattern I noticed years ago when I wrote some posts analyzing post and comment counts at a bunch of blogs on the Bloggernacle: activity is up on weekdays and down on weekends. I’m actually a little surprised that the ratio of my posts on Mondays to other weekdays isn’t even higher, as when I have a post finished, I’ll sometimes wait and put it up on Monday because I figure that’s the day it will get the most exposure. And given how low-traffic a blog we are now, it’s unlikely that I’ll be posting over the top of anyone else.

Finally, here’s a breakdown by day of the month. I’ve put the days into groups of three to make the data less noisy.

It looks like I’ve been the opposite of a stereotypical home teacher, blogging noticeably more in the first part of the month than at the end. I’m honestly really surprised to see any pattern here at all. I just made the graph because I had the data and it was easy to do, but I didn’t expect to see anything like this strong of a trend. My three lowest-output day groups are the last three in the month. I really can’t think of what might have caused this.

Anyway, if you’ve made it through my navel-gazing, thank you for reading. Please feel free to share your preference for numbers-based or silly posts in the comments.