Two blogs I came across recently have a page that shows their posts as a calendar. One I already follow, the other I found a few days ago while poking around the small web. It is fun to look at, and I thought, why not do this too?
Robert Birming's stats page is more than a calendar. He calls it "Blogging by numbers," and that is what it is: total posts, words, streaks, average per month, busiest month, all in numbers. Then there is a calendar you flip through, with a dot on every day he posted, and under that the full list of every post he has written.
Jim Nielsen's calendar archive goes bigger. Every month is a little grid of days, and the days he posted have the title right there in the box. Fourteen years, all on one page.
Sure, my archive page already lists every post. But a calendar is visual. Everything is grouped by date, and you can take it all in with one look.
Micro.blog already has a stats plugin, and I did try it first. It was not the look I wanted, which is not the same as saying it is bad. What pushed me to build my own was the word count. It said I had written over 70,000 90,000 words, and that did not feel right. Then I realized it was counting words I did not actually write: movie synopses, book blurbs, dictionary definitions, where my own thoughts are a small part. It was also counting Short Stacks, my weekly roundup, which repeats every micro from that week one more time. I wanted a count of what I actually wrote.
So I made two pages.
The Calendar is the grid. Twelve little month blocks per year, four across and three down, and every day gets a square. Blank if I posted nothing, light if I posted once, darker if I posted two or more. It goes back to 2022, when this blog had a handful of posts, then a long blank, then this year. You can see the gaps. August is a solid block because of Blaugust. The slow months look slow.
The Pulse is the stats, and it only covers 2026. Not just numbers, but infographics too: bars for every month, a split between titled posts and micros, and bars for every category, so you can see what I write about most. No surprise, Reel and Remote sits on top. Those posts are quick and easy to write, and I happen to love watching movies. Plus the small stuff, like busiest month, longest gap, and posts per day. The titled-versus-micro split is the one that answered a question for me.
Looking at both pages together was fascinating. I learned so much about how I had blogged this year just by looking at them. One thing that stood out is that I post micros far more often than titled posts. Early in the year it was almost all micros. Then somewhere around the middle of the year I switched to titled posts, short or long, and the squares on the calendar got lighter. I will write more about why I changed the way I write later. Short version: the calendar counts days, not words.
Neither page is for finding a post to read. That is what the archive is for. These two pages show a pattern: how often I post, when I post, what I post about. You do not notice your own pattern one day at a time. You only see it when it is all in front of you.
That is the fun part about blogging. It writes your history for you. Every post is a little time stamp of what you were doing, watching, thinking, or building that day. Scrolling the calendar feels like flipping through a photo album, except you never had to remember to take the picture. Some random Tuesday in March that I had completely forgotten is still there, with a square on it, waiting for me to click.
If your blog has some history behind it, go make one. It is a nice way to see what you have been doing without reading a single post.
As for me, I sure hope I keep blogging, and that one day my calendar grows as big as Jim's.
This post started as a draft from Claude (AI). I edited and expanded it, put it in my own words, and every decision about what stayed, what went, and what it says was mine.