My friend Matt did an analysis of his longtime blog. Looks amazing.
I’ve been blogging since 2000. That’s an effing long time.
I exported the entire archive and asked Claude to help me build a tool to generate something similar.
Like Matt and others the arrival of Twitter and other microblogging made for a quiet era. The blog was rebuilt in 2024 thanks to Greg.
Clearly I’ve been posting more since then.
Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft
Archive analysis — 2000–2026
Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft has been publishing since 2000. Over 27 years, 1,762 posts have accumulated 365,517 words. The typical post runs just 119 words. At its most prolific, March 2003 brought 48 posts in a single month; recent years are quieter, but the archive has never gone fully dark.
Posts Per Year
Publishing peaked in 2002 with 335 posts and has settled to 23 in 2026. The early years dominate — see the golden era note below.
Average Post Length Per Year
Post length has never grown consistently — average post length has ranged from 18 words (2025) and 904 words (2016). Most years cluster between 60 and 150 words, reflecting an archive that has always leaned toward short-form writing.
Posts by Day of Week
Mon is the most active publishing day (303 posts); Sat the quietest (194). Weekdays average 258 posts each; weekends 234 — the gap is smaller than you might expect.
Time of Day
Two peaks dominate: 9pm (147 posts) and 9am (139 posts). The pattern points to writing before the workday or after it — the midday hours are notably quiet by comparison.
Most Prolific Weeks
The single busiest week was 2002-W19, with 17 posts in seven days. All 20 of the top 20 most prolific weeks fall before 2010 — that pace has never been matched since.
The Halloween Anchor
7 of the 10 longest posting silences ended in October or November. The blog may go quiet for months at a stretch, but Halloween reliably brings it back. The longest gap: 287 days from January 2019 to October 2019.
| Days silent | Gap from | Resumed | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 287 | Jan 2019 | Oct 2019 | ← near Halloween |
| 279 | Jan 2014 | Nov 2014 | ← near Halloween |
| 256 | Feb 2022 | Oct 2022 | ← near Halloween |
| 249 | Jan 2015 | Oct 2015 | ← near Halloween |
| 232 | Mar 2021 | Oct 2021 | ← near Halloween |
| 224 | Nov 2019 | Jun 2020 | |
| 211 | Jan 2024 | Aug 2024 | |
| 208 | Aug 2020 | Mar 2021 | |
| 194 | Apr 2023 | Oct 2023 | ← near Halloween |
| 179 | May 2018 | Oct 2018 | ← near Halloween |
Embedded Videos
Vimeo leads with 80 videos across 122 posts, followed by YouTube (66). 2008 was the peak year for video embeds; TikTok shows up almost entirely in the most recent posts.
Videos per year by platform
Stacked total per year
Top 10 Longest Posts
The longest post — “My Years as a Metaverse Warlord” (3,319 words, 2023) — stands well apart from the rest: the typical post here is just 119 words. Most long-form entries are annual reference posts or personal essays.
| Title | Date | Words | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | My Years as a Metaverse Warlord | 2023-04-19 | 3,319 |
| 2 | The Long, Long Arm of Google | 2007-10-09 | 2,546 |
| 3 | A year in the empty offices | 2021-03-10 | 2,000 |
| 4 | Year Two in the empty offices | 2022-02-17 | 1,898 |
| 5 | Notes from SXSW 2003 | 2003-03-13 | 1,761 |
| 6 | Two months with a Chevy Bolt | 2017-06-30 | 1,714 |
| 7 | Pulp Fiction | 2004-10-20 | 1,614 |
| 8 | The sad state of smart homes | 2026-04-08 | 1,595 |
| 9 | A hard summer | 2025-12-30 | 1,583 |
| 10 | Two months with a Tesla Model Y | 2020-08-12 | 1,549 |
It’s a bit humbling to realize that twenty-seven years of my life can be distilled into a few hundred tokens and a series of vector embeddings. Claude managed to find ‘consistent themes of technical curiosity,’ which is a very polite way of saying I’ve been complaining about broken APIs and proprietary cables since the Clinton administration.
Twenty-seven years of blogging and my most consistent behavior is apparently disappearing every January and crawling back for Halloween like a vampire who forgot what month it was. At least I’m reliable about something.
With video now the dominant form on social media, a lot of my recent posts are just embeds of videos I’ve made. I do enjoy making videos. It’s powerful storytelling, which is a strange thing to say about a clip of me opening a beehive.
Looking ahead to the next quarter-century of Cruftbox, I’ll keep writing posts, even if they are basically just long tweets.
I regret nothing.
