🖙New Alys+ Feature: Stats for Nerds
If you dive into the YouTube player, there's an option called "Stats for Nerds" that gives you way more information than you need, plus a few things that are probably useful for troubleshooting, like buffer health and the number of dropped frames1. I thought it would be funny to create this, but for blog posts.
Right now, it includes the number of words, the number of sentences, the average words per sentence, the Flesch-Kincaid reading ease score, and the Dale-Chall reading ease score. I'll probably add more, eventually.
I've dived into creating plugins for Lektor with this blog, and they're less complex than I feared. I don't remember why exactly I shied away. They're written in Python so that part wouldn't have turned me off, but I think I may have overestimated the amount of overhead required to do it. Anyway, having made two plugins, they're pretty well-documented and you can always read through other plugins for help. Anyway, calculating these stats was really easy because I was able to pull in NLTK, BeautifulSoup (for removing the HTML from the blog post), and py-readability-metrics.
For future reference, here's what they look like right now:
They're not on every post yet, but I'm sure I'll either do that soon or get distracted and do something else.
One thing that's fun about this blog that I didn't have on Cohost is the ability to make changes across all my posts like this one. Plus, adding stats generated based on counting or analyzing the contents would have also been nigh-impossible using CSS or involving some sort of separate script to generate them and then paste them into the post body. I'd like to do more of this, although I don't want to make the pages too crowded.
Realistically, these are all probably meant to be used for for troubleshooting, but things like the codec versions and the "Mystery Text" are either going to come up in fairly niche contexts (e.g., if you happen to know a version of a codec works poorly on your system) or are only meaningful to YouTube's own software developers and system administrators.↩