2014 in bellybuttons

So this is New Year's Eve, and what have I done? Another year over, in which I made nine 'blog posts (eight if you ignore this one) - half the number of last year's tally. What's gone wrong? Is the 'blog dead??

The first two posts of the year were my usual navel-gazing stat-counts. I followed this up with a post about Excel functions. Then in March I had a spring-clean and the site got a new name. I claimed in that post that the next job would be to sort out my increasingly creaky website, which has sat pretty-much dormant for the last two and a half years (coincidentally the same amount of time I've been in a proper full-time job since I graduated, all those moons ago... what are the odds??). I have not lived up to this claim: I have done nothing to the site.

What did I do instead? In April I unleashed my Excel version of 2048 upon an unsuspecting world. I count this among the year's greatest achievements. In May I put up a PowerPoint slide (again, more showing off disguised as a helpful hint), then in July I did another Excel-related post, showing how to build your own spreadsheet version of usvsth3m's Fight! tool. This is what I had become.

Then, to prove I still had some connection to libraries, I had a good moan about CILIP (as is tradition). And that, ladies and mesters, was the last peep for five months.

This is the point where I should excuse my laxity by announcing that I've been writing a novel. But I've not added anything to that since March. Alas, the first half of the year was rather taken up with job applications, and (family aside) nothing destroys free time quite so much as those things. Free time and creative spirit. 

By the time that job app season was over, I was hard at work at work on various website and spreadsheet related gadgets, and the thought of carrying that stuff over into my leisure time didn't exactly appeal. So I watched a load of Doctor Who, listened to a lot of podcasts and generally vegged out for a bit. Frankly, I needed a rest.

I interrupted my resting for two Library Camps in the back end of this year (one in Leeds, and the national one in Newcastle), both of which were fun, and neither of which I wrote up (though I did do some live tweeting). Likewise, where's my entertaining spin on Sieghart? I could've had you rolling in the stacks with that one, I'm sure! But I didn't. Mainly because I felt I'd be rehearsing old posts (in much the same way that Sieghart said nothing very new). I didn't want to add to the water-treading... it would just have become a tedious tirade against lazy journalists, and given how much I've failed to write this year, my house is too well glazed for stones like that. 

The 'blog isn't dead, though. It's just resting. And while it rests, I'm still twittering away like nobody's business. 

Or am I...

Let's take a look at the evidence!

Total tweet tally for 2014: 6,000 (up from 3,787 in 2013). That's an average of 16 tweets a day (up six on last year).

5 RTs per day (up three) and 6 @s (up two). One contains the wordstem "libr*". Pulling that data out to a week, we get a table like this one:

	2012	2013	2014
Tweets/week	43	73	115
@s	21 (49%)	29 (39%)	40 (34%)
RTs	8 (18%)	17 (24%)	35 (30%)
libr*	3 (8%)	4 (6%)	9 (8%)

My proportion of @s is down slightly. My RTs are up by roughly the same margin, and my library tweeting has more than doubled in real terms. Well that's probably something at least?

Enough waffle. Let's cut to the word cloud!

  

  
When I'm not retweeting, I seem to be talking to @greebstreebling an awful lot, and the presence of @r4isstatic, @JMFrankland and @GrevilleTombs puts the brunt of that chatter at several Sundays spent watching Doctor Who on UKTV Drama. Had @ned_potter not changed his twitter handle mid-year (obviously inspired by my own rebranding), he would be up there too, proving that I'm more likely to tweet to someone than to shout across the office.

Library is down there in the bottom right, smaller than last year, and about the same size as Eurovision and Strictly. There's also a Libraries above @Girlinthe's head. The popularity of amp is actually due to my use of the ampersand, but I can see I've been getting to have the odd bit of a think now and then. This wordcloud doesn't include any tweets I've done this evening, but I doubt they'd alter things too drastically.

Peak tweeting this year was in July when I clocked in 712 (23 tweets a day), in part the result of me live-tweeting the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony (an evening I had completely forgotten about until I did the research just now), partly also #UHMLG14. My twittering low came in April, when I only managed 228 tweets (8 per day), presumably because I had better things to do.

So that's the story of my 2014... a story of better things to do, and of a greater variety of things to say when I do say them. Next year I hope to keep that up, while still having more things to offer here than tweet counts. Let's see how it goes.

I hope 2015 is very very lovely to you and that you thoroughly enjoy your time in it! See you later!