Lots of charts

I’ve added a couple of pages of bar charts to the site. Having accumulated all this stuff it seemed necessary (in a way) to see how much of it there was, over time.

While the charts are best viewed on those pages, here are a few in plain graphical form, for posterity:

Chart of tweets per year — Tweets by @philgyford per year

Chart of photos posted to Flickr per year — Photos posted to Flickr per year

Chart of emails receive per year — Emails received per year. Not counting: work, discussion lists, most newsletters, spam, or anything else I threw away.

Chart of cinema visits per year — Cinema visits per year

Most of the charts will update automatically thanks to systems beavering away in the background. I’ll have to manually update those showing emails received, headaches, and GitHub activity each year (the latter could be automated but it’s not worth the bother).

Did I learn anything? It was interesting that Tweets and Links have quite smooth rises and falls of usage over time. I was surprised how many photos I posted to Flickr in 2005 compared to every other year (805 compared to the next highest, 335). Similarly, I wrote many more blog posts in 2003 compared to any other year (170 vs 87).

I hadn’t charted my serious headaches (or minor migraines) before — I just enter them in my calendar. Having got used to their frequency recently I’d forgotten there were fewer several years ago. It’s possible my record-keeping was different I guess.

I wrote more about all the events (cinema visits etc.) in more detail earlier in the year.

Before doing this I imagined I’d have more variety in terms of style of chart, but bar charts seem to do the job. Maybe I’ll think of more complicated things in future.

The charts are all made with D3.js which is probably overkill for htis but I like the amount of control I can have, and I enjoy fiddling with it. A man’s got to have a hobby.