100 Days To Offload

2024-02-05

The ever-excellent Kev Quirk in 2020 came up with this challenge: write a blog post on each of 100 consecutive days. He called it #100DaysToOffload, in nominal reference to the "100 days of code" challenge. I was reflecting upon this as I reach this, my 36th consecutive day of blogging and my longest ever "daily streak" (itself a spin-off of my attempt at Bloganuary this year), and my 48th post of the year so far.

Might I meet that challenge? Maybe. But it turns out it's easier than I thought because Kev revised the rules to require only 100 posts in a calendar year (or any other 365-day period, but I'm not going to start thinking about the maths of that).

That's not only much more-achievable... I've probably already achieved it! Let's knock out some SQL to check how many posts I made each year:

SELECT
 YEAR(wp_posts.post_date_gmt) yyyy,
 COUNT(wp_posts.ID) total
FROM
 wp_posts
WHERE
 wp_posts.post_status='publish'
 AND wp_posts.post_type='post'
GROUP BY yyyy
ORDER BY yyyy

My code's actually a little more-complicated than this, because of some plot, but this covers the essentials.

A big question in some years is what counts as a post. Kev's definition is quite liberal and includes basically-everything, but I wonder if mine shouldn't perhaps be stricter. For example:

Should I count checkins, even though they're not always born as blog posts but often start as logs on geocaching websites? (My gut says yes!)
Do reposts and bookmarks contribute, a significant minority of which are presented without any further interpretation by me? (My gut says no!)
Does a vlog version of a blog post count separately, or is it a continuation of the same content? (My gut says the volume is too low to matter!)
Can a retroactive achievement (i.e. from before the challenge was announced) count? Kev writes "there is no specific start date", but it seems a little counter to the idea of it specifically being a challenge to claim it when you weren't attempting the challenge at the time.
And so on...

In any case, I'd argue that I clearly achieved the revised version of the challenge on certainly six, probably fourteen, arguably (depending on how you count posts) as many as nineteen different years since I started blogging in 1998. My least-controversial claims would be:

September 2003, with Timewasting
April 2004, with Chez Geek Card of the Day
April 2005, with Curry with Alec and Suz
July 2006, with Coolest Personality Test I've Ever Seen
July 2007, with It's All Fun and Games
June 2010, with Saying Goodbye
October 2011, with Poly and the Census - Success! (almost)
August 2012, with A Bus Called Peter
June 2018, with Dan Q found GLW6CMKQ 16th Century Pub (Central London)
August 2019, with Dan Q found GC6KR0H Bay Area Calibration Point #4 – New Technology
December 2020, with The Fourth Way to Inject CSS
August 2021, with Dan Q found GC531M9 Walk by the Firehouse #1
October 2022, with Dan Q performed maintenance for GC9Z37H Friar’s Farm – Woodland Walk
August 2023, with Inclusivity

Given all these unanswered questions, I'm not going to just go ahead and raise a PR against the Hall of Fame! Instead, I'll leave it to Kev to decide whether I'm (a) eligible to claim a 14-time award, (b) merely eligible for a 4-time award for the years following the challenge starting, or (c) ineligible to claim success until I intentionally post 100 times in a year (in, at current rates, another two months...). Over to you, Kev...