How to track the number of your blog posts in graphical form

The goal, here, is to have a graph of your number of total blogs, by time.

To start with, a disclaimer that will surely be ignored: the objective is not to use the number of posts as a measure of a blog’s worth, or as a goal; in other words, quantity before quality! That’s not the point at all - but I’m sure that I’ll be accused of promoting that, anyway. But I just do this for fun.

It can, however, be inspiring - assuming you write interesting, useful, quality posts - to look back and see how many posts you had written, say, 6 months ago, and how many there are now. It can also be helpful to see your blogging tendencies, like “I was too busy that month, so the line stayed flat”.

If, on the other hand, you think that looking at the amount of blog posts will make you write just to see the line go up… forget all this. Easy. I really don’t want to be accused of promoting having the number of posts as a blog’s main goal.

Having said that, here goes nothing…

All of this is for WordPress blogs, and requires you to have shell access to the server, and to be able to query the MySQL database. If you have your blog hosted somewhere, such as WordPress.com, you won’t be able to do this. If you use some other blogging software, this is possible, but the queries will be different, and you’ll have to write them yourself.

I’m assuming that each of your blogs is in a different database. WordPress allows you to use a single database for several blogs, by having different table prefixes, but I prefer having them apart. Once again, if you have a single database, it’s just a matter of adapting the queries.

Obviously, you need to have MRTG installed.

So, finally:

1- file /etc/mrtg-blogposts.cfg

WorkDir: /var/www/htdocs/blogposts Options[blogposts]: nopercent,noi,growright,nobanner,nolegend,noinfo,gauge,integer Refresh: 6000 Target[blogposts]: `/root/bin/blogposts.php` MaxBytes[blogposts]: 5000 Title[blogposts]: Blog Posts PageTop[blogposts]: <h1>Blog Posts</h1> XSize[blogposts]: 500 YSize[blogposts]: 250 XScale[blogposts]: 1.4 YScale[blogposts]: 1.4 YLegend[blogposts]: posts ShortLegend[blogposts]: posts Legend1[blogposts]: Blog Posts Legend3[blogposts]: Max Posts LegendI[blogposts]: Blog Posts: LegendO[blogposts]: Blog Posts:

2- file /root/bin/blogposts.php

#!/usr/local/bin/php <?php $posts[1] = rtrim (`mysql -s -u blog1user -pblog1pw blog1 -e ’select count(*) from wp_posts;’ `); $posts[2] = rtrim (`mysql -s -u blog2user -pblog2pw blog2 -e ’select count(*) from wp_posts;’ `); $posts[3] = rtrim (`mysql -s -u blog3user -pblog3pw blog3 -e ’select count(*) from wp_posts;’ `); # … $total = array_sum ($posts); print “$total\n”; print “$total\n”; print `uptime`; print `uname -n`; ?>

NOTE 1: the script is in /root/bin , because it contains the databases’ passwords.
NOTE 2: obviously, you should change blog#user, blog#pw and blog#.
NOTE 3: if there are more blogs, just add the queries at “# …”, in the script

3- in root’s crontab:

*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg-blogposts.cfg

And that’s it. I’m assuming that /var/www/htdocs/blogposts exists, that the web server is making that directory available, and so on.

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