This scarcely seems believable, but it’s true: the first post on this incarnation of the Beans was made ten years ago today when Kev published A Brave New Beans. I still think of this as the “new” Pouring Beans, but it’s been running nearly twice as long as the original. This blog, and all it contains, now forms a record of the whole of our thirties.

Anyway, I wanted to make a post marking this slightly unbelievable milestone, so I have taken my inspiration from Kev’s original post. His “A Brave New Beans” was just a test to make sure everything was set up, and it just contains the word “words” repeated 127 times (I counted). So let’s see how many words we have produced in ten years.

All the words on Pouring Beans

If you put all those posts and pages together to form a book, it would be the same length as Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, or slightly shorter than Ulysses by James Joyce. If you sat down to read it in one go, at an average reading speed of 250 words per minute, it would take you about 18 hours and 20 minutes.

	Number published	Total words	Average
Posts	976	270,929	278 words per post
Pages	16	2,100	131 words per page
Podcast episodes	40	1,830	46 words per podcast

Words written by each member

We can break that down a bit and see how many of those words were bashed out by each of us.

	Posts made	Total words written	Percentage of all words written	Average words per post
Ian	424	136,416	49.6%	321
Chris	455	124,809	45.4%	269
Kev	97	13,925	5%	127

Top ten wordiest posts

There’s been a lot of averages so far, but obviously some posts are longer than others. Here’s the ten posts with the highest word counts ever.

Score	Post	Author	Words
1	From the archives: Constantly Falling, the series	Chris	1,124
2	Four Word Reviews: Schizophrenic	Chris	1,115
3	2024 State of the Beans Address (wow, that’s recent)	Chris	1,004
4	Film Reviews – Mr. Majestyk	Ian	1,001
5	Memories (approaching the grey hemisphere)	Ian	996
6	Hamtaro: Ham-Hams Unite!	Ian	959
7	Newsboostnight	Chris	922
8	Four Word Reviews: Tubthumper	Chris	915
9	Four Word Reviews: Right Now	Chris	913
10	Four Word Reviews: Discomania	Chris	909

It turns out that, even though my average words-per-post is lower than Ian’s, I’ve actually written most of the site’s longest posts. I think that means I’ve also written a lot of the shortest, thanks to my tendency to just post a photo with a sentence or two of explanation when I need to get an extra post in towards the end of the month.

Unfortunately that means Kev doesn’t appear in the top ten at all. His longest ever post is The end (probably) of #TapSaga, which has 689 words and is 39th on the leaderboard.

Least wordy contributions

A fair number of posts just have a single image without any text, which my high-tech AI algorithm counts as one word but which are really zero. Among the shortest posts with actual words in are Modern Art (Ian, 5 words); Last thought of February (Ian, 3 words) and [redacted] (Kev, 1 word).

There is another post with just one word in it. You see, for some reason, when he made a quick post to test the new Beans setup, Kev wrote “words” and then copied and pasted it lots of times. But in between them weren’t spaces. In between them were “non-breaking space” characters, which display a gap but which aren’t recognised as a space between words. That’s why, if you look at the post, all those 127 words go scrolling off the edge of the screen, because your computer can’t find anywhere to break the chain and wrap it onto the next line.

It means that all those 127 words count, officially, as one word.

So hooray for A Brave New Beans: the first post on the Beans, written ten years ago today… and technically, also, the shortest.

Now let’s get the ball rolling on the next ten years. We need to start documenting our forties.