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.
       
 (IMG) Monochrome photograph showing sprinters at the starting line.
       
       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...
       
       Update: Kev's agreed that I can claim the most-recent four of them, so I
       raised a PR.
       
       LINKS
       
 (HTM) Kev Quirk
 (HTM) Kev Quirk's initial blog post about his proposed challenge
 (HTM) 100daystooffload.com
 (HTM) My blog stats, specifically my "longest streaks" scoreboard
 (DIR) My blog post reflecting on Bloganuary, including links to all 31 Bloganuary posts.
 (HTM) Kev Quirk's blog post revising the rules of his #100DaysToOffload challenge
 (HTM) My checkins
 (HTM) My reposts
 (HTM) My vlogs
 (HTM) Timewasting
 (HTM) Chez Geek Card of the Day
 (HTM) Curry with Alec and Suz
 (HTM) Coolest Personality Test I've Ever Seen
 (HTM) It's All Fun and Games
 (HTM) Saying Goodbye
 (HTM) Poly and the Census - Success! (almost)
 (HTM) A Bus Called Peter
 (HTM) Dan Q found GLW6CMKQ 16th Century Pub (Central London) 
 (HTM) Dan Q found GC6KR0H Bay Area Calibration Point #4 – New Technology
 (HTM) The Fourth Way to Inject CSS
 (HTM) Dan Q found GC531M9 Walk by the Firehouse #1
 (HTM) Dan Q performed maintenance for GC9Z37H Friar’s Farm – Woodland Walk
 (DIR) Inclusivity
 (HTM) I raised a PR