Rake task for Jekyll stats

A few months ago, I realized that I had written 100 posts on this blog. This prompted me to add a rake task to quickly look up stats about this blog. This is highly coupled to this blog’s theme, but hopefully someone might be able to convert this to work for their own blog.

The taks prints out the number of posts, the total number of words written and number of posts by year. Here’s the task from my Rakefile:

require "nokogiri"

desc "Print stats about this blog"
task :stats do
  yearly_stats = Dir["_posts/*"]
    .map { |filepath| filepath.delete_prefix("_posts/").split("-").first }
    .tally
    .sort_by { |k, _v| k }
    .to_h

  total_posts = yearly_stats.values.sum(&:to_i)

  total_words = Dir["_site/posts/*/index.html"]
    .sum { |file| word_count(file) }

  puts <<~STATS
    Total posts: #{total_posts.to_s.rjust(8)}
    Total words: #{number_to_human(total_words).rjust(8)}

    Yearly stats

  STATS

  yearly_stats.each do |year, count|
    puts "#{year}\t#{count.to_s.rjust(4)}\t#{"|" * count}"
  end
end

def word_count(file)
  File.open(file) { |f| Nokogiri::HTML(f) }
    .at_css(".post .content")
    .text
    .strip
    .split
    .count
end

def number_to_human(n)
  n.to_s
    .split("")
    .reverse
    .each_slice(3)
    .map(&:join)
    .join(",")
    .reverse
end

If you want to customize this for your own blog, there are a couple of things that might be different for you:

• The word_count method has a reference to the ".post .content" DOM element, which might be different in other blogs.
• The permalink for my blog is /posts/:title/, but you might have something different, so you’ll need to chagne the "posts/*" everywhere to match the pattern for your permalink.

When I ran rake stats for this blog, this is what I saw:

Total posts:      110
Total words:   65,348

Yearly stats

2010       5    |||||
2011       4    ||||
2012       1    |
2013       1    |
2014      20    ||||||||||||||||||||
2015      32    ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2016      11    |||||||||||
2017       6    ||||||
2018       1    |
2019       4    ||||
2020       5    |||||
2021       1    |
2022       2    ||
2023      13    |||||||||||||
2024       4    ||||

Wow, 65,000 is a lot words. That’s approaching a novel’s size!