Skip to content

Tag: Data

2022 Goodreads Reading Challenge

Posted in Book Blogger

While I’ve meant to, I’ve never actually written a post about my Goodreads Reading Challenge activity. I’ve actively taken part in the challenge every year since 2018. Generally, I’ve been conservative with my goal. In 2022, I went fairly easy on myself, setting a goal of only 36 books.

Since I haven’t looked back at my reading in previous years — on my blog, at least — I want to provide a brief overview of the previous years’ challenges, too. After all, while I know many of my readers are here for the fountain pen posts, 32% of my blog content is related to books.

If you’re interested in what I thought of the books I read, you can take a look at my book review posts, or my Reviewed list on Goodreads. I don’t always review the books I read, and, even for those I do, they aren’t guaranteed to make it on here.

Survey Results

Posted in Miscellaneous Information

First off, thank you to everyone who responded to my survey. I’ve closed down the form, and I want to share the results. If you can’t see the charts below (depending on what device you’re on right now, it may be too small to read) you can view it on Google Data Studio. If you don’t want to view the charts, there’s a basic table further down in this post.

The votes surprised me. I didn’t think you’d be interested in brand “grudges,” and I thought pen porn would rate higher. I’ll have to do this again next time I’m running short on ideas.

My Pen Collection – 2022

Posted in Fountain Pens

Another year, another overview of my collection. Last year, I used Adobe Illustrator and created vector images for each table — accuracy was a pain in the butt. This time, I went with Google Data Studio. I don’t have as many shape and display options as I do with Illustrator, but I can more easily separate and display data this way. I have so much fun playing with data that I went a little overboard with this, so you can click through the four pages at the bottom of the frame. Or, if it’s easier for you, you can view directly in Data Studio.

Inventory Method Update

Posted in Fountain Pens

Three and a quarter years ago, I wrote about inventories as part of my fountain pen series. Bac then, I was using Google Sheets to keep track of my pen and ink collections. Of course, at the time, I only had 50 total pen records.

As my collection grew, I found that I needed something with more features than Google Sheets. After some searching, I found Airtable. It’s basically a WYSIWYG database. You can customize your databases quite a bit, if you’d like, or you can work with very basic features. You can use most of the features with a free account, but there are additional features and reporting abilities available with a paid account.

My 10 Most-Used Inks

Posted in Fountain Pens

The other day, I was going through my inks, and I couldn’t help but wonder what inks I use most. So, me being me, I dug into my data, and pulled out my 10 most-used inks. To figure out which they were, I looked for which inks have been used in my last four notebooks (since I started tracking inks). Only 6 inks were used in all 4 notebooks. The remaining 4 were inks that I used for both regular rotation in 3 notebooks and had in always inked pens.

Honestly, I was rather surprised by the results, as these aren’t my favorite inks. At least, not the inks I think of when asked about favorites. Maybe I’ll cover those in another post.

Note: This list is in alphabetical order. I scanned my personal ink swabs from my ink notebook. I’ve done my best to make the inks look true-to-life, but I can’t account for everyone’s screen settings, only mine.