Quotations about:
    ~admin

Apologies to those getting WIST via email or RSS. With the most recent upgrade on 17 April to WordPress 6.5.2, my RSS feed (which drives the follow.it email subscriptions) has defaulted to a “normal” feed, which loses the author information and other formatting. Unlike other instances of this (needing to replace the RSS feed modules with my customized version), it’s unclear why this is happening (the customized versions are still there). I’ll need to dig more deeply into this in my copious free time, unfortunately.

If you see a quote that seems interesting, and you want to know more (see more, see who said it, etc.) you can always click on the “title” to see the underlying WIST entry.

I’ll continue to work on this, but, yes, I’m aware it’s happening.

This is a Test. This is only a Test.

Today the WIST.info site hit 20,000 quotations, all individually curated over the last (mumblety-mumble) years (and, in many instances, re-worked, re-researched, re-fleshed-out, etc.). It appears this quote from Thomas Jefferson turned the odometer.

Here’s to the next 20K!

Time for another “State of the WIST” post.  I last ran this report in December 2021, so this is more of a 3-quarter update than annual.

I’ve been pretty consistent about getting new quotes loaded in over the past year — my goal is  5-6 quotes posted per weekday. A gradually increasing number of quotes in my backlog turn out to be ones that I already have in the system, in which case, if I end up making substantive improvements (finding the sourcing, adding notes, expanding alternate translations), I count that upgrade as a “new” quote in my head for purposes doing my quotational duty (even if it doesn’t actually add to the “count,” doesn’t show up on the front page, and doesn’t go into my RSS feed).

What’s happened over here since last time?

Some changes that took place on the WordPress site the past year:

• Did a sweep through of some authors whose citations were all sorts of whacky-inconsistent. This often uncovered duplicates, which I cleaned out (more on that below).
• The tool I used to automatically mirror posts on this site (both new and upgraded) to my Diaspora* site has stopped working, so for the time being I am doing that manually (it adds a couple of minutes to each post).
• Feedburner finally shut down.
• Took concrete steps toward getting the theme updated to be responsive to different sized screens (more below).

Doing the Numbers

Let’s look at the numbers:

So continued progress, despite some housecleaning.

Broken out into a graph (and normalizing the time frame):

Limited Return to Office time does help keep those numbers up.

Note that, as always, all of these quotations are personally curated to some degree or another — digging out citations and online links when possible, finding author photos, etc. No mass uploads for me.

I currently stand at 685 quotes flagged as meme/visual quotations. That number’s gone up a bit since last year, though slowly; I generate one of these every few weeks.

Top Authors

Of the authors I have, who are the most quoted in WIST?

As the numbers get higher, it’s harder folk to do more than shuffle around, esp. barring I find any massive new source of quotations. Nobody was added this year to the list, or dropped, just adjusted in rank — Jefferson and Lewis swapped position, as they had in the 12/2021 list.

The actual quote count for Emerson, Shakespeare, and Shaw actually went down, as I did a clean-up of duplicates I had of them.

This table is more for curiosity’s sake than any real meaning, showing not just how prolific these folk are, but how interested I am in recording things these individuals said.

The Top Ten Author list is shown “live” in the sidebar (“Prolific Authors“).

Top Quotations

Here are the Top 10 Most Visited Quotations Ever (with how they’ve changed since last December 2021). I find these interesting, since it’s not driven anything I do, but page hits by visitors:

1. – (10,505, was 9,374) John Kenneth Galbraith, “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
2. – (6,743, was 6,464) Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)]
3. – (6,288, was 6,177) Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942)
4. – (5,716, was 5,476) Bertand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933)
5. – (4,972, was 4,938) John Steinbeck, Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962)
6. ↑ (4,910, was 4,512) Fran Lebowitz, “Tips for Teens,” Social Studies (1981)
7. ↑ (4,678, was 4,008) Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to Clara Rilke (1 Jan 1907)
8. ↓ (4,649 was 4,590) William Hazlitt, “On The Conduct of Life” (1822)
9. ♥ (4,407, new on list) Plato, Republic, Book 1, 347c 
10. – (4,346, was 3,947) Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980)

Some actual movement here, with the Lebowitz and Rilke quotes that entered the Top 10 last time rising in the standings, at the expense of pushing Hazlitt down and sadly losing a long-standing and fine James Baldwin quote.

Over 2022 to date, the Top 10 viewed quotes were, according to Google Analytics:

1. ↑ 933 views – Plato — Republic, Book 1, 347c
2. – 857 views – Galbraith, John Kenneth  — “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
3. ↑ 700 views – Aristotle — (Attributed)
4. ♥ 676 views – Homer — The Odyssey [Ὀδύσσεια], Book 6, l. 180ff (6.180) [Odysseus to Nausicaa] (c. 700 BC) [tr. Rieu (1946)]
5. ↑ 645 views – Sa’adi — Poem on Humanity
6. ↓ 589 views – Rilke, Rainer Maria —  Letter to Clara Rilke (1 Jan 1907)
7. ↑ 495 views – Franz Kafka — Letter to Oskar Pollak (27 Jan 1904)
8. ♥ 388 views – Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics [Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια] (c. 325 BC) (paraphrase)
9. ↓ 347 views – Lamb, Charles —  “The Two Races of Men,” Essays of Elia (1823)
10. ↓ 346 views – Fran Lebowitz, “Tips for Teens,” Social Studies (1981)

Dropping from the list were a Voltaire, and one of the few “Other” quotes to previously rank this high (it came out at #11 for the period).

Several, but by no means all, of the above have a graphic image / meme associated with them on their page, and many are the overall Top 10 list. But a few are new to the list this year; the Homer (which was added this year) and the second Aristotle (which I did updates on).

Who Are You People?

As Google Analytics gets more complex, figuring out old simplistic stats becomes a bit more difficult. As far as I can tell, though compared to the end of 2021, I am getting 128 visitors / day (vs 127) and 168 pages visited / day (vs 151). So traffic is fairly stable, despite mobile data downchecks from Google (see below).

Over in social media, I’m posting to Twitter  (143 followers, up from 134). I have 69 contacts on my Diaspora* mirror (up from 50), and I actually get some good engagement over there with likes and discussion.

Those numbers aren’t huge, by any means — but this is a labor of love, and it’s nice to see that some folk are finding it of use and/or interest.

Gender (identified in 32% of visitors), splits 51-49 female-male. For age (identified in 30% of visitors), the 18-24 visitors are 28% (college papers, I assume), 25-34 cohort is 20%, 35-44 is 17%, 45-54 is 14%, 55-64 and 65+ cohorts are about 10%.

Not surprisingly, for language the vast majority (82%) of visitors to WIST.info are flagged as one flavor or another of English-speaker, with the US (65%) and UK (13%) topping the list (about where they were last December). From a national representation (where users were so identified), 53% were from the US, 7% from the UK, 5% from India, another 5% from Canada, and 2% from Australia.

Browser-wise, Chrome retains the lead at 55%, with Safari at 27%, Edge and Firefox just about 5% each. That’s interesting to cross-reference with OS, where Windows is 33% of the users, iOS and Mac each another 20%, and Android at 19%. The iOS and Android numbers are interesting, given my site’s “unfriendliness” to mobile users (see below). None of those numbers have changed substantially since 2021.

The Year Ahead

The biggest plan I have for WIST in the next few months is that I’ve hired someone to put in a responsive theme. Google is consistently (and not without justification) dinging my rankings because my site is “unfriendly” to mobile users (text too small, links too close together, etc.).  A responsive theme will adjust the display automatically for different sized screens (PC vs mobile, for example).

The complexity here is that I have highly customized my post display (post titles as citation titles, e.g.), which means it can’t just be done out of the box, and, honestly, it exceeds my own limited programming ability. So I’m going to be hiring someone from outside to make it happen. I have a project requirements document prepared, I’ve had one failed attempt on UpWork … let’s see if I can get it done.

Other goals?

• Continue backfilling tags as I come across quotes that have captured my eye again. Maybe do some tag cleanup (there are some that are redundant — plural vs singular) and others where I’ve inadvertently concatenated terms).
• Continue making some author sweeps to normalize how some works are organized.
• Continue work on parallel translations of foreign works.

And that’s the end of the Q3 report for 2022. See you next time I get an urge to do this!

WIST will be on vacation until May 31.

By happenstance, spotted the quotation counter in the right-hand margin today. As someone who’s curated (and often typed in) every single one of those 19,000 quotes, I’m kinda proud of the milestone.

(For the picky: that’s almost certainly not the right number: it includes a number of drafts, as well as admin posts like this one. But it’s close enough. 😁)

I just learned that Google is sunsetting its Feedburner email setup in July, which is what I use here to send out daily email collections of the quotations here. At present, about three dozen people are using this service for WIST.

I’ve removed the link for that mode of subscribing, and I’ll be looking at alternatives to provide that service, and will let you know what that looks like. In the meantime …

1. If you don’t want the email feed any more, please unsubscribe via the links that Feedburner sends. My intent is to transfer the email addresses of subscribers over to whatever new, different thing I do.
2. Check out the feeds/subscription page for WIST, which will show you alternate ways to get your WIST updates.
   1. Using an RSS reader, Twitter, or my Diaspora mirror (currently down due to a data center issue, but returning Real Soon Now) are all ways to get notifications.
   2. There are a number of services that will do a daily email from an RSS feed. (That’s essentially what Feedburner is doing.) One of my alternatives may just be to provide other recommendations for that, but if you have a favorite, this would be a fine time to switch over (but do let me know what your recommendation is).

One issue I have is that, while there are plugins that will allow email subscriptions pretty easily, they tend not to do so as a digest, but as different emails for each post. That might be annoying to folks. At the same time, I’d just as soon not work with a mail service like MailChimp to set up something elaborate.

Leave any questions or comments in the comments. I’ll be communicating further with you on this before I make any changes.

Time for another “State of the WIST” post.  I last ran this report in April 2017. In the intervening time there were some long periods when I was not getting much posted, though that’s largely recovered this past year or so. I try to get 5-6 quotes posted per weekday; I’m no longer posting daily images, but when a quote seems fitting for one, I’ll do it.

What’s happened over here since last time?

Some changes that took place on the WordPress site the past few years:

• • Upgraded to the most recent versions of WordPress. Which turned out to be easier than expected (and a good excuse to get rid of some plugins I no longer need).
  • Turned on secure connections (https: access). Not that there’s anything here that needs that, but site that don’t get little nasty messages on the browser, so I did.
  • Lost (and haven’t yet found a good way to fix) a mobile theme that works well. WIST is still usable on phones, but, as Google is always reminding me, it’s not “optimized” for that.
  • I added a Random Quote button.

• My mirroring to Google+  has gone away with that site, and I no longer mirror to Facebook — but I am mirroring to a *Diaspora site (automatically), as well as my Twitter feed.

Doing the Numbers

Let’s look at the numbers:

So continued progress.

Broken out into a graph (and normalizing the time frame):

There’s a slight decrease in slope over the past few years, but it’s nearly unnoticeable.

Note that, as always, all of these quotations are curated to some degree or another — digging out citations when possible, finding author photos, etc. No mass uploads for me.

Top Authors

Of the authors I have, who are the most quoted in WIST?

As the numbers get higher, it’s harder folk to do more than shuffle around, esp. barring I find any massive new source of quotations. While everyone’s overall numbers went up, that’s esp. more true for folk toward the top — Emerson added 41 since last time, Shakespeare 20, etc. (Lewis actually went down slightly, as I deleted some duplicate quotes I’d entered.)

Martin Luther King, Jr., is back on the board again, displacing Eric Hoffer from the Top 10.

This stat is more for curiosity’s sake than any real meaning, showing not just how prolific these folk are, but how interested I am in recording things they wanted to say.

The Top Ten Author list is shown “live” in the sidebar (“Prolific Authors”).

Top Quotations

Here are the Top 10 Most Visited Quotations Ever (with how they’ve changed since last April 2017):

1. ↑ (7,786, was 5,019) John Kenneth Galbraith, “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
2.  – (5,979, was 4,803) Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)]
3. ↓ (5,926, was 5,019) Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942)
4. ↑ (5,073, was 3,552) Bertand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933)
5. ↓ (4,882, was 4,589) John Steinbeck, Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962)
6. ♥ (4,171, new) William Hazlitt, “On The Conduct of Life” (1822)
7. ↓ (3,920, was 3,360) James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority,” Speech, Kalamazoo College (Feb 1960)
8. ↓ (3,746, was 2,960)  Molly Ivins, “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (9 Mar 1993)
9. ♥ (3,375, new) Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980)
10. ♥ (3,322, new) Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “The Historian as Participant,” Daedalus (Spring 1971)

Some actual movement here, with three quotes entering the top 10 (losing a Thomas Campbell and a spurious Albert Einstein). I find this interesting, since it’s not driven anything I do, but page hits by visitors.

Over 2020, the Top 10 viewed quotes were, according to Google Analytics (albeit with a gap between March and September):

1. 682 views – Rilke, Rainer Maria —  Letter to Clara Rilke (1 Jan 1907)
2. 661 views – Galbraith, John Kenneth  — “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
3. 482 views – Plato — Republic, Book 1, 347c
4. 440 views – Hazlitt, William — “On the Conduct of Life” (1822)
5. 393 views – Voltaire — Questions sur les miracles (1765)
6. 387 views – Lamb, Charles —  “The Two Races of Men,” Essays of Elia (1823)
7. 359 views – Sa’adi — Poem on Humanity
8. 292 views – Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. — “The Historian as Participant,” Daedalus (Spring 1971)
9. 283 views – Asimov, Isaac — “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980)
10. 275 views – Aristotle — Nichomachean Ethics (c. 350 BC)

Not surprisingly, most of the above have a graphic image / meme associated with them on their page, and many are the overall Top 10 list. Only a few, though, were on the same year list in April 2017.

Who Are You People?

The gap in Google Analytics data makes it hard to see a full snapshot, but looking at the last three months, my traffic is up from April 2017, with each day, on average, 138 visitors (vs 45), and 183 pages viewed (vs 73).

I still have 25 people who get a daily email (via FeedBurner) of WIST content

Over in social media, I’m posting to Twitter  (132 followers, up from 127). As noted above, Google+ has gone away, and I’ve dropped Facebook. I have 33 contacts on my *Diaspora mirror.

I’m skipping over my Tumblr and Pinterest numbers, give that I have not been manually mirroring to those sites in a while.

Those numbers aren’t huge, by any means — but this is a labor of love, and it’s nice to see that some folk are finding it of use and/or interest.

Gender (identified in 40% of visitors), splits 54-46 female-male. For age (idenfied in 31% of visitors), the 18-24 and 25-34 cohorts are each around 25% of visitors. the 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, and 65+ cohorts all hover around 12-13% each.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority (87%) of visitors to WIST.info are flagged as one flavor or another of English-speaker.  Nationally, 56% are from the US, another 8% from the UK, with India, Canada, and Australia rounding off the Top 5 (at 6, 5, and 3%).

57% of visits here over the last year used Chrome (up), 29% Safari (up), 5% Firefox (down), 4% Edge (up), 2% IE (down). 34% were Windows users (down), 24% Mac (up), 20% iOS (up), and 17% Android (up). Those last two numbers are interesting, given the “unfriendly” nature of the site for mobile users.

The Year Ahead

I don’t currently have any major plans on WIST for the coming year, but some things i do have in mind:

• Continue backfilling tags as I come across quotes that have captured my eye again. Maybe do some tag cleanup.
• Do another “are they dead yet?” sweep of the authors.
• Figure out how to better support mobile access. The way I customize the display makes finding a usable (customizable) theme difficult.

And that’s the end of the not-very-annual report for 2020. See you next year!

No quotations added to WIST today, but I have gathered up a couple of WIST quotation collections over on my regular blog:

• Quotations on an Election Day
• Quotations about the Presidency (WARNING: my political opinions may be expressed in the margins)

I have added a new button at the top of the sidebar, letting you pull up a random quotation from the bowels of WIST. Give it a try!

A helpful correspondent (waves at Mardy) noted that the Feedburner emails were not including any citations as to who actually said the quotation in question. This appears to have been the case since 5 May, when I last updated WordPress for WIST; the RSS files are customized due to my non-standard way of using the data elements in WP for this blog (e.g., using the title for citation, using the category for author information, etc.). Long story short, when I update WordPress, I have to manually restore those custom files, and I didn’t, thus losing the “who” part of the quotations in RSS feeds, including the one that generates the Feedburner emails.

This appears to be now working properly, so future emails should go out correctly. Sorry for the snafu.

I have finally bitten the bullet and upgraded WIST to version 5.x of WordPress. The immediate impetus was the need to update the mobile version of the page, as JetPack is dropping their mobile theme and the existing theme doesn’t provide adaptable design for smaller screens. Updating the theme really means first updating the underlying platform.

(I’ve actually already turned off the JetPack version, so if you access WIST from a mobile device, you’ll simply be looking at a smaller version of the web page.)

The theme update may be a while in coming, as it requires a lot more modification for the data field customization I’ve done here. But at least the WP engine is up to current standards and, thus, security.

If anything on the site seems to be operating oddly, please let me know at dave@wist.info. Thanks!

Time for another year’s “State of the WIST” post.  I last ran this report a year ago.

What’s happened over the last year?

Some changes that took place on the WordPress site this year:

• I cleaned up the page design a bit — nothing radical, just some color and typography improvements.
• Mobile phone access (that’s actually readable on a mobile phone)! Woot!
• Behind the scenes, I’ve made some performance improvements (fixing some stuff that was dragging performance waaaaay down, but also putting some better technology in place).
• I’m continuing to post one “graphic” / meme quotation each time I do my five. I’ve had to change from PixTeller, though (who changed their underlying system to suddenly become much less usable) to Canva.

Doing the Numbers

Let’s look at the numbers:

So continued progress. Generally speaking I post five quotes a day, every weekday — though, to be honest, that number was a lot spottier starting mid-2016 (due to new employment, then some more unemployment).

Broken out into a graph (and normalizing the time frame):

Note that, as always, all of these are curated to some degree or another — digging out citations when possible, finding author photos, etc. No mass uploads for me.

Top Authors

Of the authors I have, who are the most quoted in WIST?

I had nobody new on the Top 10 Quoted Authors list this year, just some shuffling around within the stats, with Emerson rising to the top when I came upon a new trove of his quotations (the man was prolific, between his lectures and his journals). Runners-up (Bertand Russell, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Fuller, Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King) are all within spitting distance of getting on the list if I run across a good source of unused quotes for them.

The Top Ten Author list is shown “live” in the sidebar (“Prolific Authors”).

Top Quotations

Here are the Top 10 Most Visited Quotations (with how they’ve changed since last year):

1. ↑ (5,019, from 4,459) Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942)
2. ↓ (4,803, from 4,587) Aeschylus, Agamemnon, l. 179
3. — (4,589, from 4,120) John Steinbeck, Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962)
4. ↑ (3,688, from 2,635) John Kenneth Galbraith, “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
5. ↑ (3,552, from 2,696) Bertand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933)
6. ↓ (3,350, from 2,915) James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority,” Speech, Kalamazoo College (Feb 1960) –
7. ↑ (2,960, from 2,391) Molly Ivins, “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (9 Mar 1993)
8. ↓ (2,797, from 2,631) Thomas Campbell, “Hallowed Ground” (1825)
9. — (1,815, from 1,660) Albert Einstein, (Spurious / Synthetic)

Nothing new on the list, just jockeying for position. That’s not surprising, since the numbers have gotten so big and have been tracked for so long.

Over the last year, the Top 10 viewed quotes were, according to Google Analytics:

1. 803 views – John Kenneth Galbraith,  “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
2. 587 views – Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980)
3. 566 views – Bertrand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933)
4. 375 views – Albert Einstein, “My Credo,” speech, German League of Human Rights, Berlin (Autumn 1932)
5. 374 views – T. S. Eliot, Preface to Transit of Venus: Poems by Harry Crosby (1931)
6. 358 views – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Path of Law,” 10 Harvard Law Review 457 (1897)
7. 301 views – Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) –
8. 294 views – Molly Ivins, “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (9 Mar 1993)
9. 275 views – Theodore Roosevelt, Letter to Henry L. Sprague (26 Jan 1900) –
10. 273 views – Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Trumpet of Conscience,” Steeler Lecture (Nov 1967)

Not surprisingly, a number of the new entries on the list above were quotes that have graphic images associated with them.

Who Are You People?

Google Analytics shows me my traffic was up this year, vs the last two, with each day 45 visitors (vs 32) making 50 visits (vs 37) and viewing 73 pages (vs 51).

I have another 25 (vs 19) people who get a daily email (via FeedBurner) of WIST content

Over in social media, I’m posting to Twitter (127 followers, up from 112), Facebook (31 likes overall, up from 25), and Google+ (roughly 66 followers, up from 26).

I also started posting the quotations with graphics on on Tumblr (1 whole person following!) and Pinterest (10 people following!).

Those numbers aren’t huge, by any means — but this is a labor of love, and it’s nice to see that some folk are finding it of use and/or interest.

Age-wise, for the blog the biggest cohorts are 18-24 and 25-34 (24% and 22% respectively); the other cohorts are about 10-15% each. In gender, 57% of the visitors are female.

85% of visits are by English-speakers; no other cohort gets above 1.25%. Nationally, 57% are from the US, another 8% from the UK, with India, Canada, and Australia rounding off the Top 5.

51% of visits here over the last year used Chrome (up), 23% Safari, 11% Firefox, 7% IE, 3% Edge. 48% were Windows users (down), 21% Mac, 15% iOS, and 13% Android.

The Year Ahead

I don’t currently have any major plans on WIST for the coming year, but some things i do have in mind:

• Continue backfilling tags as I come across quotes that have captured my eye again. Maybe do some tag cleanup.
• Doing another swing through the authors to give pictures to all who have at least 3 quotes.
• Do another “are they dead yet?” sweep of the authors.

The biggest question mark I have is how changing to being employed again (whenever that happens, soon I trust) will change posting patterns again. We’ll see.

And that’s the end of the annual report. See you next year!

I’ve not been as diligent on the whole “five quotes every weekday” thing as I’d like to be this past month. A combination of a new job (where I can’t get WIST work done during the day) and National Novel Writing Month (meaning I spend a couple of hours every night after work writing fiction as fast as I can) has interfered a lot with WIST this month.

That said, November is almost over, and December couldn’t possibly have any other conflicts on my time, right? Right?

Regular quotation publishing will resume shortly.

I’ve activated (and tweaked) the WordPress JetPack mobile theme for WIST, so that people on smaller mobile devices don’t get eyes strain trying to visit the place. If you visit on a mobile phone or any device below a certain resolution, you will get a streamlined version of WIST which should be much easier to read. If you want to shift back to the original, there’s a link at the bottom that says “View Full Site” that will take you there.

I am still having a few formatting problems, particularly with the humongous “WIST” logo at the top. My apologies for that — I’ll strive to fix it as soon as I can figure out how.

Please leave comments with any problems you are having. Thanks!

As those who visit the site should notice, I’ve made some design changes here to make things look a bit more modern and tidy, and (I hope) improve readability (through some different fonts and graphic elements).

If something looks crazy on your screen, or there’s some aspect of the site design that’s causing you problems, please let me know. Thanks!

I’m away on holiday this week. I will be publishing a few pre-queued posts each day, though, with full production back to normal next week.

Time for another year’s “State of the WIST” post.  I last ran this report a year ago.

What’s happened the last year?

Some changes that took place on the WordPress site this year:

• I made visible the quotation “topics” field, etc., which I’ve been adding for 2+ years now on new quotes (and backfilling on quotes that I edit). I’ve also been adding topics to the most popular quotations in the database.
• I’ve started adding a meme / graphic to at least one quotation a day, using PixTeller. These have been pretty popular (in terms of views), though I haven’t seen any “in the wild” yet. I also have been backfilling graphics on the most viewed quotations in WIST.
• I have extended the author pictures to all of them with at least four quotes in the system; all new authors get a picture, of course, and as I add quotes any for existing authors without a picture, I add it.
• I added in a plug-in to show “possibly related quotes.” If nothing else, I’ve found it useful in spotting duplicates.

Doing the Numbers

Let’s look at the numbers:

So continued progress. Generally speaking I post five quotes a day, every weekday. Sometimes I miss a day, but rarely (being unemployed helps with such projects). I’ve also combined duplicate quotations as I’ve found them.

Broken out into a graph (and normalizing the time frame):

Note that, as always, all of these are curated to some degree or another — digging out citations when possible, finding author photos, etc. No mass uploads for me.

Top Authors

Of the authors I have, who are the most quoted in WIST?

I had nobody new on the Top 10 Quoted Authors list this year, just some shuffling around within the stats, with Shakespeare pulling ahead of Jefferson again. Runners-up (Bertand Russell, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Fuller, Abe Lincoln) are all within spitting distance of getting on there if I run across a good source of unused quotes for them.

The Top Ten Author list is shown “live” in the sidebar (“Prolific Authors”).

Top Quotations

Here are the Top 10 Most Visited Quotations (with how they’ve changed since last year):

1. – Aeschylus, Agamemnon, l. 179 (4,587, from 4,530)
2. – Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (4,459, from 4,019)
3. – John Steinbeck, Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,120, from 3,331)
4. – James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority,” Speech, Kalamazoo College (Feb 1960) – (2,915, from 2,550)
5. ↑ Bertand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (2,696, from 2,400)
6. – Thomas Campbell, “Hallowed Ground” (1825) (2,696, from 2,430)
7. ♥ John Kenneth Galbraith, “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963) (2,635)
8. ↓ Thomas Campbell, “Hallowed Ground” (1825) (2,631, from 2,430)
9. – Molly Ivins, “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (9 Mar 1993) (2,391, from 1,825)
10. ♥ Albert Einstein, (Spurious / Synthetic) (1,660)

Over the last year, the Top 10 viewed quotes were, according to Google Analytics:

1. John Kenneth Galbraith,  “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963) – 735 Views
2. John Steinbeck, Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) – 586 Views
3. Molly Ivins, “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (9 Mar 1993) – 405 Views
4. Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) – 297 Views
5. James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority,” Speech, Kalamazoo College (Feb 1960) – 259 Views
6. T. S. Eliot, Preface to Transit of Venus: Poems by Harry Crosby (1931) – 257 Views
7. Aldous Huxley, “Sermons in Cats,” Music at Night and Other Essays (1931) – 215 Views
8. Charlotte Gilman, Suicide note (17 Aug 1935) – 204 Views
9. James Baldwin, “Faulkner and Desegregation,” Partisan Review (Fall 1956) – 185 Views
10. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Path of Law,” 10 Harvard Law Review 457 (1897) – 180 Views, tied with …
11. Bertrand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) – 180 views

Some overlap there, as you might expect, but definitely some up and comers from some more recently added quotations. 

Who Are You People?

Google Analytics shows me my traffic was flat this year — a precise match for the stats last year — with each day 32 visitors making 37 visits and viewing 51 pages. I have another 19 people who get a daily email (via FeedBurner) of WIST content. Over in social media, I’m posting to Twitter (112 followers, up from 92), Facebook (25 likes overall), and Google+ (26 followers). The social media aspect hasn’t taken off as I’d hoped, but, honestly, I’m not doing this (mostly) for the publicity. Though it would be nice. Tell your friends!

Age-wise, the biggest cohorts are 18-24 and 25-34 (a bit over 20% of the sessions each); the 55-64 cohort is at around 17%, and the other cohorts are roughly equal. In gender, 58% of the visitors are female.

87% of visits are by English-speakers; no other cohort gets above 1.2%. Nationally, 63% are from the US, another 7% from the UK, with India, Canada, and Australia rounding off the Top 5.

44% of visits here over the last year used Chrome, 20% Safari, 15% Firefox, and 14% IE. 54% were Windows users, 19% Mac, 13% iOS, and 10% Android.

The Year Ahead

I don’t currently have any major plans on WIST for the coming year, but some things i do have in mind:

• Continue backfilling tags and graphics
• Doing another swing through the authors to give pictures to all who have at least 3 quotes.
• Do another “are they dead yet?” sweep of the authors.
• I’m beginning to get an itch to redo the blog design. We’ll see.

The biggest question mark I have is how changing to being employed (whenever that happens, soon I trust) will change stuff. I may need to change to posting in the evenings, and the graphics may end up being reduced in number. We’ll see.

And that’s the end of the annual report. See you next March!

It’s been a while (since February 2007), but for everyone’s edification, here are the current WIST stats:

The “Total Quotations” number doesn’t quite sync up with the number at the top of the main page due to the latter including Adminstrivia posts (such as this one).

The number is still not as huge as other sites — but all of those quotes have been looked at, examined, and an attempt made to source them. I think that’s worthwhile.

As to the currently most represented here …

Dave Barry and Abe Lincoln fell off the Top 10; Russell and Franklin are the adds this time.

I’m running Google Analytics on this page currently, as far as tracking visitors. I’m getting about 910 hits here per week, most of which come from Google. Not huger numbers, but respectable.

Of the visitors, 57% are from the US ; other countries are all below 10% each, with the UK, Canada, Ireland, India, and Germany having the most visitors. About 50% are on IE (down from 61% last time); Firefox shows as 40%, with smaller blips for Safari and Opera.

Not sure what it all means, but there it is. For myself, I’ve been pleased with my regimen to post five quotations daily here. I hope my loyal readers enjoy what they’re seeing; I thank you one and all.

It’s Election Day here in the US. On my “regular” blog, I’ve pulled some WIST quotations from some past US Presidents about the future before us.

In June 2001 I started running a free “quote a day” e-mail list. In April 2002, I changed from Topica (great service, excellent price, ugly ads) to my own listserver.

You can subscribe to it by going here.

Since I have some space to kill here, I’ll answer one of my most frequently asked questions (thus demonstrating that nobody asks me any questions), “So how do you put your daily WIST together?”

Well, around 5:30 p.m. or so, every day, I get a reminder up on my computer screen. “Have you sent your WIST today?” If I didn’t get this sort of warning, it would never happen. Read from that what you will.

I open up a blank e-mail. I put in the address I have for posting mail to my list.

I go into the body, and click on my “signature” button. This pulls in a random sig line from my copy of Siggy (see “Software” for more information).

Unless it’s something completely wrong for the day, I then glean a one or two word subject, put it in the subject line, and click Send. And away it goes.

My host’s MailMan magic mailing system does the rest of the work, appending in all the other stuff that fills each post.

I occasionally do a “theme” week, but by and large, it’s all randomly selected for your WISTing pleasure.

And now you know. And, as GI Joe would say, knowing is half the battle.

UPDATE: (17-Jul-07) I’ve disabled the mail link above because the new setup doesn’t support an automated process, and I’m not going to continue the WIST-by-mail unless that’s working (or is trivial to do).

I’ve been collecting quotes, aphorisms, maxims, and sig lines since junior high (which is more years ago than I care to relate). I read books of quotations. I dog-ear pages in books I’m reading so that I can come back later and copy particularly good bits out. And, more recently, I quickly jot quotes I see down in my Palm so I can have a record of them.
When I first put together a quotations collection (a hard-copy effort, given as a Christmas gift to people who didn’t mind something that was cheap if it had the personal touch), I called the collection “WIST” for “Wish I’d Said That.”

That name is important because it’s not altogether true. This is not just a collection of quotations whose sentiments I agree with. In some cases there are ideas that I disagree with, firmly; in those cases, though, I’ve included the quote either because I admire the turn of phrase or else I thought it was so absurd, it made me smile just to read it.
But me repeat that in big, bold lettering, so that people don’t miss it:

In other words, don’t e-mail me a complaint just because I quoted someone saying something you object to.

Now, the fact is, I do agree with most of what I quote here. Hopefully it will become pretty obvious when I don’t (or, again, when it isn’t a matter of agreement, but just enjoying a particular expression of thought). And, of course, there are some quotations where I agree with them sometimes, disagree with others.

So if I don’t always wish I’d said something, why not change the name? Tradition, I suppose, plus it’s a handy catch phrase.