Finding the drive to write articles for this blog has not been working that great. Justifiably, I always find something else to do. Lately, I stumbled upon a blog written by Jim Fitzsimmons and I have been inspired to set up a goal to write more.

Jim argues that “it’s a numbers game”, where the key to being a better writer is to write. This reminded me of a book I had skimmed through some years ago Everybody Writes, where the author Ann Handley suggests that “Writing is a Habit, Not an Art”.

And that is the reason I have decided to set the milestone for 1,000,000 words for myself as well. Mind you, 1,000,000 words is no easy feat and will probably take some time to come anywhere close. However, it does give a stimulus to share what I have learned in the past 5 years. I have had the advantage to realise several projects ranging from programming to model building, and that will probably be my focal point (at least for now).

Word Count

How will I know I am reaching my milestone? Well, I am not going to count the words for every post manually, that is for sure. After some digging, I found a way to word-count my posts using Liquid and display it on my Jekyll website. Here is the syntax for that:

{% assign count = 0 %}
	{% for post in site.posts %}
		{% assign wordCount = post.content | number_of_words %}
  	{% assign count = count | plus: wordCount %}
{% endfor %}

If you are trying to include this on your website and you got stuck, send a tweet and I will try to help you out.