5 Years, 2 days

That’s how long I’ve been blogging here. Looking back I’m relatively surprised that I’ve actually posted with reasonable consistency. If I’m at a conference or other event, I blog a lot – trying to capture as much from the sessions as I can, and otherwise I tend to post a couple of times a month.

I thought a Wordle of my blog would be a good way of celebrating 5 years, so here it is - this is based on all entries, comments and pingbacks from the last 5 years (but not this entry)

Comments

[Lukas Koster]

Owen, nice idea: especially as it seems"to cry out "Need Library!!!!

Or is it "Library need"?

[Tom Roper]

Cool, as the young people say. Coming up for my fifth too, so thought of copying you.But when I do, it only bases the Wordle on the most recent posts. How did you get it to inlcude all posts, commments, trackbacks etc?

[Owen Stephens]

Congratulations! I'm afraid it took a bit of doing - I exported all posts and comments using the Typepad 'export' function. This gave me a text file with everything in. I then tidied it up with a text editor (Textpad in my case) to remove various things like tags, labels, dates, email addresses etc. which I thought might skew the cloud in a less interesting direction. Finally when I'd done this I pasted the resulting text into the Wordle application text box - it took a while to process the text, but eventually came through. I did also try using Many Eyes, which outputs in different visualisation formats - including Wordle - and decided that for illustrative purposes Wordle was the nicest.

[Tom Roper]

Great, thanks.Plenty of time to do that, as I think I started round end of November/beginning of December. Trying to remember what I used. Only went onto TypePad in April 04, though brought the first six months entries over from the previous platform