Amp your archive with stats

No law says your archive has to be boring. You can nerd it up with stats, which I have done with my own archive. First, I figured out how to get Textpattern to automatically keep track of how many blog entries I made each year. I already knew how to do this for the grand total, so it was just a matter of making a few adjustments. Now, as you scroll down, you can see the number of posts in the heading for each year. Then I came across a nifty sparkline graph on Chris Burnell’s website. It’s an example of his web component, svg-sparkline. So, of course, I made one for Newsonaut. It’s pretty simple to use, a lot simpler than trying to make one on your own. You just point to a JavaScript library that Chris has made available on a CDN, then customize some HTML to make it look the way you like. The gradient option is a nice touch for the fill. You can also make it animate, with the line drawing itself from left to right. I thought about doing this, but decided not to get too carried away.…