Over the last three years, I’ve spent a substantial amount of time writing and maintaining this weblog. Aside from the hours spent fiddling with Blogger templates, CSS, and the PHP code that I now use to maintain the site, I’ve written a large number of words. Now if only I’d selected these words more carefully and strung them together to make a story, I’d have written a good sized novel by now! Shucks.

To demonstrate this fully, I’ve cobbled together a script that counts the number of words in a weblog and compares the returned figure with the word count of some famous novels. If you would like to try it, the script requires PHP to be running on your server and your weblog to be stored in a MySQL database.

• Download blognovels.zip (1.6K)

• Modify blognovels.php with your MySQL details

• FTP to your server.

Here’s the script in action. As you can see, I’ve sailed past The Wizard of Oz, The Thirty-nine Steps, The Jungle Book and Black Beauty and I’m now hot the heels of Gulliver’s Travels!