If there’s one thing that sets this blog apart from any other blog in the whole blogistan, then that is its author’s (that is to say, my) ability of not updating regularly. And when you consider the fact that this post that you are reading right now should have been uploaded about a month ago, you can realize that when I say that I don’t update regularly, I mean it!

I know. I am probably the greatest procrastinator of recent times. And it’s not just blogging; there are loads of things in my life right now that are highly messed up just because yours truly is a lazy giraffe. But anyway, I wouldn’t want to talk about them while (sort of) celebrating Ulta Seedha’s 5th blogiversary. Instead, as is the tradition of Ulta Seedha, here are some random statistics.

Posts

Ulta Seedha has seen 93 posts in the five years it has been online. That makes an average of 1.55 posts every month.

Wow.

Sigh.

Of course, this post count does not include those entries which were lost in the Diary-X crash. (For those who don’t know: before Ulta Seedha got its own domain two years ago, it was hosted on Diary-X.) The post count also does not include those posts (mainly poems) that I wrote before I started blogging, and the pages which fall out of the regular blog timeline (About, FAQ, etc). All of the statistics that I provide below are based on these 93 posts.

The most lengthy post that I have written in these five years is also the last post of these five years: An Evaluation of Popular Time Wasting Algorithms, which contained 1653 words of brilliant nonsense.

The shortest post contained just 6 words and two photographs: This Morning. The shortest, picture-less post was Glass of Water, containing 14 words.

Average length of a post turned out to be 424.1290323 words.

Comments

Despite my rarely updating attitude, I have been very fortunate to have a great readership in these five years. They might not know it, but I have always learnt a great deal from every one of my readers and the comments that they left on my ulta seedha stuff. And some of the readers are also my good friends now. I guess I have just been very lucky.

Before I tell you the stats regarding comments that this blog received, let me tell you something interesting: I have not used the comment count reported by WordPress. Instead, I have re-counted the comments excluding my own, and have considered the unique number of people who commented on a particular post. In other words, if a person XYZ has commented three times on a post, I have counted those as only one. The results are quite amusing.

Total number of comments is 975. This makes an average of 10.48387097 comments for each post. (Going by the regular count, there are 1632 comments, with an average of 17.5483871 comments for a post.)

The post receiving the highest number of comments, 27, was Yet Again. The regular count says that it received 43 comments. (Runner-up is “میں کام کرتا ہوں”, which received 25 comments, and which tops with 54 comments of regular count).

The least number of comments is, well, ZERO. 3 posts share this count, and no, I am not mentioning them. They are highly immature. (That’s not to say that the rest of the blog has anything mature to offer!)

Miscellaneous

On past blogiversaries, I had also calculated the maximum and minimum number of days between updates, but for the 5th blogiversary, I won’t. I’ll only embarrass myself if I mention them.

Which brings us to the next thing…

E-book

Yep. An e-book.

I know, I know. I am not a prolific author. Heck, I am not even a proper author. This blog is certainly not a masterpiece, and has nothing to offer except long hiatuses. Still, I thought that an e-book containing a collection of posts from the past five years would be something interesting to do.

Also, I wanted to say ‘thanks’ to all of you who have been reading and supporting Ulta Seedha. Couldn’t think of any other way.

Update: The e-book has now been removed.

(I apologize for the ridiculously large size of the e-book, specially to dial-up users. Sadly, that’s the smallest size I could achieve even after all the PDF compression techniques.)

And now, dear friends, let’s just see if I can make it through the 6th year.

Let me elaborate. There are quite some “hot” topics that one can blog about these days. Specially if you live in Islamabad, then the highly dramatic hungama that is currently being “performed” on Shahrah-e-Dastoor, is totally irresistible. On the other hand, if you are a cricket fan, then the opening match of the 2007 world cup between Pakistan and West Indies is a great thing to write about (and consequently, to rant about how the men in green uniforms lost). I, however, have never understood the delicacies of neither politics nor cricket. And, as I just claimed, I am also selfish. So, standing true to my claim, I am not going to talk about anything except my blog, and it’s 4th birthday.

Some two weeks ago, a friend of mine very nonchalantly told me a very interesting thing. He was just stating that man, being the strange species that he is, longs deeply for something, but after that something is finally under his possession, he loses all his interest in it. As an example, he said to me that after I had gotten my own domain and hosting space for my blog, I had been less frequent in updating it, while before that when my blog had been hosted on Diary-X, my updates (albeit less frequent then too) were pretty regular. (I know, some would disagree with that too.) Silently, I agreed with him. Not really agreed with him on his theory (as there can be exceptions), but I had to agree with him on the example he presented. That is certainly not to say that I have lost interest in blogging. I mean, come on — I updated to the latest version of WordPress just yesterday.

So, here we are. At the 4th blogiversary of Ulta Seedha. And yes, I know, this has been the most slow blogging year of them all. But anyway, as before, here are some ultay seedhay stats for this blog’s 4th year:

• Total number of entries for the 4th year is 10. (You know what, I hate to admit it, but that’s really awful. Okay, so make it 11, I am also counting Year: Three in it, but just for this particular statistic.)
• The shortest entry was This Morning, having just 6 words. But then, it also contained two photographs, and according to that popular saying, those two photographs make 2000 words, making the entry’s word count 2006. Okay, forget the photographs.
• The longest entry (996 words) was بِلا عنوان.
• Average length for an entry was 556 words. (Pretty cool, huh?)
• The shortest break between two posts was of 8 days. And it was both between The Light Bulb That Never Showed Up & Eid Mubarak, and Eid Mubarak & The Walking Stick.
• The longest break between two posts was — I better hide somewhere — 75 days, between This Morning and آزادی.
• Average length of breaks was 33.8 days. Wow.

And now that I no longer suffer from Enetation, I think I can also include stats about comments:

• The entry which received the least amount of comments (8) was The Light Bulb That Never Showed Up.
• Getting the largest number of comments (28) was, of course, بِلا عنوان.
• Average number of comments turned out to be 15.4.

Okay, let me say it again, the 4th year for this blog has been the slowest of them all. And the worst part is, I don’t know if the 5th one will be similar. I mean, I have certainly matured a great deal as a procrastinator, and the WordPress upgrade that I talked about in the beginning, should really have occurred a long time ago. (But then again, I avoided the hassle of upgrading again and again, huh?) Some of the hacks done by me are not working after the upgrade, but overall, it’s not a big deal, and can be fixed within an hour or two. That is to say, if I sit down and actually work on it. The design of this blog also needs a change. Maybe in the next six months, it might come along.

And in the end, as always, a super duper Thank You to all those who have been coming here and reading all the nonsense that I have been writing, despite the frustratingly slow updates. You all rock, you all roll, and you all rule!

I, on the other hand, sleep.

Some two months ago, when this place was hosted on Diary-X, I had put on a I-shall-be-back notice on this blog/diary/journal/whatever, because there were some other things I had to take care of. I was hoping that I would finish those other things properly and quickly, and then return to this ulta seedha corner and start posting again (once in a month). Things were going as they were planned by me to go, when suddenly, two things happened:

1. I came to know that there are a lot more other things that need to be taken care of by me, and
2. Diary-X crashed. Without any data backup.

Needless to say, I reached heaven.

But soon, I had to come down on earth. The things I had to take care of kept on moving on their own pace, while I kept on thinking about the decision of to-blog-or-not-to-blog. Then one day, I searched through the caches of Yahoo! and MSN Search, and the decision was made. To blog.

Although all data was lost on diary-X, copies of many posts were there in the caches of above mentioned search engines. Also, since the comments were handled by Enetation (a service with which I have a true love-hate relationship), I was able to retrieve and save them on my machine too. And thus began the work on a new version of Ulta Seedha, which is being visited by you now.

There are so many things that need to be done or fixed in this version, and I just hope that they don’t create much problems for you all. I might even change the whole layout after some time (except, yes, the apples). Feel free to report as many errors or bugs as you can, it would be highly appreciated.

And now to the 3rd year of this blog. On the previous two blogiversaries, I had posted some ultay seedhay stats, telling which post was the shortest and longest, and the duration of breaks I had had, and etc. I was looking forward to do the same for this post too, but unfortunately, I couldn’t retrieve all the posts from the caches, and thus I am unable to make those stats complete. Maybe, just maybe, if we reach the 4th year, then the stats will be back.

And in the end, a very, very, very big Thank-You to you all. For being there to read my nonsense, and for being there to send me wishes and prayers whenever I requested for them. You are all rock stars!

The problem is that I really don’t have any explanation. There were no beautiful things; the gharwalas had no Herculean tasks for me; I wasn’t going on any secret mission; there was nothing highly important going on. It was simply ulta seedha at its extreme. I was sitting in my room and going through the archives of this journal, and suddenly I found myself typing some lines and posting them here.

(You are forgetting me, son. I typed something too.)

That’s my sub-conscious again. It (he?) has now decided to italicise also whatever it/he writes.

Anyway, you might be wondering that how this break ended too soon. It’s quite unlike me, after all. In fact, this break is much shorter than some of the unannounced breaks I have had in the past two years.

Yep. Today Ulta Seedha celebrates its 2nd birthday.

And just like on the 1st birthday, here are some ultay seedhay facts again, about the second year:

• The shortest entry of the 2nd year was Eid Mubarak!, having 5 words. Just like the previous year’s shortest entry, this also contained an image and that image contained those 5 words. The shortest, image-less entry was To the battleground (41 words).
• The longest entry was An Old Man’s Birthday (1016 words). I wasn’t expecting it to be the longest.
• The average length of an entry was 371.55555555555555555555555555556 words. (I don’t like the 6 in the end, by the way, but it had to be put there. Computers, although with all their speed and power, still have their limits.)
• The shortest break between two updates was of 2 days, between Moony and Learning Some Manners.
• The longest break between two updates was of… drumroll, please… 53 days. This was between Off and He.
• And here’s the surprise fact. I double checked it and don’t believe it. The average length of the breaks I have had between updates is 12.857142857142857142857142857143 days. (Math geeks: do you notice something in this figure? It has also been rounded off, though.)

The second year of this journal was slower. Lack of regular updates is obviously one of the reasons. To be honest, the thought of quitting blogistan often crossed my mind. But somehow I managed to go against it. And let me tell you, going against this thought would not have been possible without you.

Yes. You. The readers of this journal, who come here, actually read my random thoughts, and then care enough to comment on them. And I am such a stupid giraffe that I keep on taking ‘breaks’. (Okay fine. But you look miserable when you try to be sentimental.) I still don’t have any explanation, but I owe all of you a big note of thanks. So, thank you all. For inspiring me, for encouraging me, and for reading my ulti seedhi thoughts.

At the end of the first year, I had wondered if I would complete the second. Let’s now see if I can make it to the end of the third one.