Ironically, after posting about “Blogging Friction”, I took a break from blogging at all for awhile. When it came time that there was something I wanted to post about again, things didn’t work. Yet again, things had changed on GitHub and GitHub Pages. First GitHub stopped allowing access via passwords. You had to move to SSH access. Then, for GitHub Pages, you had to add “Deploy Tokens”, another kind of SSH token.
Let’s face it. I’m an infrequent blogger. But I’m not an infrequent writer. So why does the (vast) majority of what I write never make it onto the blog? The answer is friction. And why is that? Here is my process. Think of something that I want to write down so I remember it. Realize that what I’ve written might be useful to someone else too. (It could happen!) Look at what I have to do in order to get my thoughts from my editor to the blog.
I wanted to add an estimate of words and characters in wiki pages for a program I am writing CWiki There was some guidance on this topic (in Python) here. Of course the original Markdown.pl was a good source for matching regular expressions too. What follows is a copy of the “seed page” “About the Word Count” from the CWiki wiki program: Begin Quote Up at the top of each page, below the author and creation/modification dates, there is a line showing the number of characters in the page along with an estimate of the number of words in the page.