I’ve been noticing now with the fancy caps watermark that most of my posts begin with the letter I, and so I wondered how many of my posts were like this, so I put together a little query like so:
mysql> SELECT DISTINCT LEFT(post_content, 1) AS letter, COUNT(*) as count FROM b2posts GROUP BY letter ORDER BY count DESC;
+--------+-------+
| letter | count |
+--------+-------+
| < | 373 |
| I | 10 |
| T | 2 |
| A | 2 |
| W | 2 |
| C | 1 |
| S | 1 |
| M | 1 |
| O | 1 |
| Y | 1 |
+--------+-------+
10 rows in set (0.00 sec)
What does this tell me? Pretty much nothing except that before I came up with the autop function I started each post with a tag instead of text. Maybe it’s time to go back and clean up some old content.
what looks funny is that if you have a short post, maybe just a line, only part of that letter graphic shows up… but if your entry takes up multiple lines, then you can see the entire letter.
how about trying to put the graphic as part of the first word… i’ve always wanted to try that.
That’s a known problem, and I actually don’t plan to fix it, partly because I would like to encourage myself to write longer lines :). Also having an image instead of a letter would be semantically unwise. However if you’d like to do it I’d be happy to help you with some code to do so.
oh… heheh! i just got your e-mail! i didn’t mean ‘image’, i meant letter… but i think you got what i meant based on the e-mail i received (re: drop cap). 🙂
i’ll test it out and let you know.
it’s almost there…
if there are no records with a particular letter then you don’t get “D”…”0”, you just don’t get that letter at all…
just a thought
barry.b