As you may have noticed, I failed to post last week, thus missing my first week since I started Iron Blogger. Oops. When I started, I promised myself that I wouldn’t post if I didn’t have anything to say, and, this weekend, I couldn’t come up with a topic I felt compelled by, and, therefore, made no post.
Just from following Planet Iron Blogger in my RSS reader, I’ve been observing for a while that a lot of posts seem to get made right up against the 6 AM Monday morning deadline, which fits with my anecdotal experience of MIT people and my friends in particular as doing things right up against the deadline. This evening, I set out to back my vague biases up with data, so I grabbed Nelson’s Iron Blogger code and ended up producing this graph of posts over the history of Iron Blogger:
Mmm, that’s a pretty obvious cycle there, wouldn’t you say? (The data is only as complete as the RSS feeds of everyone involved, which usually only carry a certain number of posts, and which I haven’t been tracking since the beginning of Iron Blogger, so I mistrust the older data. I think Nelson has the full historical set, and I could drag it out of my e-mail if I felt like it.)
I’d say that pretty clearly supports my hypothesis. Not bad for a few hours’ work, and go go gadget matplotlib. I’ll try to put the code up somewhere once I’ve cleaned it up a bit. I’ve spent too much time on this tonight as it is, thereby demonstrating another MIT tendency, viz. staying up too late.