Useless Stats by Hour

By Shamus Posted Sunday Aug 6, 2006

Filed under: Projects 3 comments

I’m fiddling around with my WordPress plugin and I added a feature to show posts sorted by what hour of the day they were posted, just because I wanted to see what that would look like. Of course, I already had an idea of what it would look like before I wrote it, and I was quite confused when what I made didn’t match my expectations. Geeks are funny that way.

I most often post either during lunch, or when I knock off work between 5pm and 6pm. So, what I expected to see was a mostly flat grid, with a spike in the noon hour, and then another spike at 5pm. What I got was…

Posts by Hour

This shows how many of the blog’s posts are published by hour of the day. This can be useful to see what time of day sees the most posting activity.

Midnight: 7

(1%)

1:00: 2

(0%)

2:00: 1

(0%)

3:00: 1

(0%)

4:00: 0

(0%)

5:00: 3

(0%)

6:00: 5

(1%)

7:00: 9

(2%)

8:00: 13

(2%)

9:00: 5

(1%)

10:00: 20

(4%)

11:00: 55

(12%)

Noon: 50

(11%)

13:00: 19

(4%)

14:00: 19

(4%)

15:00: 13

(2%)

16:00: 53

(12%)

17:00: 43

(9%)

18:00: 30

(6%)

19:00: 29

(6%)

20:00: 21

(4%)

21:00: 12

(2%)

22:00: 19

(4%)

23:00: 10

(2%)

Have I been taking long lunches? Quitting early? Why are half of my lunch posts at 11am and the other half at noon? I could understand if they were all shifted forwards or backwards in time, depending on what time zone the server is in but…

<forehead slap>

Daylight savings time. Obviously the server is not taking part in the great American temporal hallucination that is DST.

I work from home, and my wife homeschools our children, so DST doesn’t really affect our lives except to annoy me twice a year.

 


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3 thoughts on “Useless Stats by Hour

  1. MOM says:

    Did you come up with that description of dst yourself? It is so wonderful. Either you are very clever or someone you read is. (or both I guess)
    mom

  2. Shamus says:

    The description is mine, so both the credit and blame should fall to me.

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