Post Stats Plugin 1.1.0 for Pelican Released

Post Stats is a plugin for Pelican, a static site generator written in Python.

Post Stats calculates various statistics about a post and store them in an article.stats dictionary:

wc: how many words (i.e. word count)
read_mins: how many minutes would it take to read this article, based on 250 wpm
word_counts: frequency count of all the words in the article; can be used for tag/word clouds
fi: Flesch-kincaid Index/ Reading Ease (more info)
fk: Flesch-kincaid Grade Level

Installation

The easiest way to install Post Stats is through the use of pip. This will also install the required dependencies automatically.

pip install minchin.pelican.plugins.post_stats

Then, in your pelicanconf.py file, add Post Stats to your list of plugins:

PLUGINS = [
           # ...
           'minchin.pelican.plugins.post_stats',
           # ...
           ]

You may also need to configure your template to make use of the statistics generated.

Requirements

Post Stats depends on (and is really only useful with) Pelican. The plugin also requires Beautiful Soup 4 to process your content. If the plugin is installed from pip, these will automatically be installed. These can also be manually installed with pip:

pip install pelican
pip install beautifulsoup4

Configuration and Usage

This plugin calculates various statistics about a post and store them in an article.stats dictionary.

Example:

{
    'wc': 2760,
    'fi': '65.94',
    'fk': '7.65',
    'word_counts': Counter({u'to': 98, u'a': 90, u'the': 83, ...}),
    'read_mins': 12
}

This allows you to output these values in your templates, like this, for example:

<p title="~{{ article.stats['wc'] }} words">~{{ article.stats['read_mins'] }} min read</p>
<ul>
    <li>Flesch-kincaid Index/ Reading Ease: {{ article.stats['fi'] }}</li>
    <li>Flesch-kincaid Grade Level: {{ article.stats['fk'] }}</li>
</ul>

The word_counts variable is a Python Counter dictionary and looks something like this, with each unique word and it’s frequency:

Counter({u'to': 98, u'a': 90, u'the': 83, u'of': 50, u'karma': 50, .....

and can be used to create a tag/word cloud for a post.

There are no user-configurable settings.

Known Issues

An issue, as such, is that there is no formal test suite. Testing is currently limited to my in-use observations. I also run a basic check upon uploaded the package to PyPI that it can be downloaded and loaded into Python.

The package is tested in Python 3.6; compatibility with other version of Python is unknown, but there should be nothing particular keeping it from working with other “modern” versions of Python.

Credits

Original plugin by Duncan Lock (@dflock) and posted to the Pelican-Plugins repo.

License

The plugin code is assumed to be under the AGPLv3 license (this is the license of the Pelican-Plugins repo).