#1 | Word Counts

Why not reading time?

I could divide the number of words by some ‘average’ time it takes to read a word and display a reading time instead. However reading/understanding speed varies per person so I’ve decided to display a word count which has zero variance.

Accurate word count

I’m using the liquid tag post.content | strip_html | number_of_words to get the word count of a post. Without strip_html the word count is inflated particularly when code is included. Let’s add some more code to this post.

x = 1
y = x*2
z = y*3

When I manually count the words in this article I get about 114. Close enough.