Plugin to plug your blogging progress

Here’s another nice plugin for WordPress: “Word Stats” by Fred van den Driessche. This plugin allows you to place blog statistics anywhere on your blog. You can embed them in a post, in a page, or in any section of your theme. It even comes with a built-in widget that automatically gets activated when you activate the plugin.

You can define multiple named formats for displaying the information. Each format contains HTML code along with any number of pre-defined embedded symbols for each of the supported statistics. These include:

Example: There are %blogwords% in this site, posted over %first2last% days

For the widget, you just supply the name of the format you want to use, and a widget title. If you’re not using the widget, you can just add a call to the PHP function

word_stats('format name');

anywhere in your template code. Or, to embed it in a page or post, use

<!--word_stats;format name;-->

Note that when you first add the plugin, no stats have been collected. Edit and save an existing post or add a new one to calculate the stats. Stats are automatically recalculated whenever you perform either of these actions.

You can see the widget in action in the sidebar on the right if you’re viewing this at my site. I placed it both here and at Chip’s Tips. Oddly, even though the number and frequency of my posts differ widely between the two sites, the average number of words per post is about the same. I guess I run out of gas around 270 words. I’ve got a ways to go to reach TDavid, who is at almost one megaword.

UPDATE: Made a correction to this plugin as researched by TDavid and expounded in his comment here.  I agree with TDavid that HTML tags should not be included in the word count.  You might want to change that in the master version, Fred.