How much is on this board

The site is a set of PHP arrays, one entry per page. When you asked for this page, the same code that decided what to show you also walked every one of those entries, counted them, flattened their prose into plain text and counted the words.

Nothing is stored. There is no build step, no cached total, and no figure written down by hand anywhere. If a panel were deleted, every number on this page would change on the next request without anybody touching them.

A stored number drifts. Somebody writes that a site has a certain number of pages, the site grows, and the sentence stays. It is not a lie at the moment it is written and it becomes one quietly.

Computing at request time removes that failure completely. It costs a small amount of work on every page load and it buys a guarantee: a wrong number here is a bug in a rule you can read, rather than a stale fact nobody noticed.

That is the whole argument for this section existing. The corpus panels are the demonstration that the board holds itself to the same standard it applies to the strings.

Very little on its own, and the board is not going to pretend otherwise. Words are easy to produce, and length correlates with effort only loosely and with quality barely at all.

It is included for two reasons. It is honestly computable, which is the entrance requirement for anything on this site. And it is a weak metric shown openly, which is more useful than a strong sounding metric with no basis. A board that only showed flattering numbers would be a board doing selection, and selection is the quiet way a dashboard misleads.

Reading time is the word count divided by two hundred and twenty and rounded up. Two hundred and twenty is a convention rather than a measurement of you, and your actual rate depends on the material, your familiarity with it and what else you are doing.

It is shown because it converts an abstract quantity into a scale people have intuitions about. It is not shown as a promise, and the number on the tile is arithmetic on a convention rather than an observation of anybody reading anything.

• Visitors. There is no analytics of any kind here, no counter, no log analysis and no cookie.
• Requests. The board does not know how many times any page has been asked for.
• Links from anywhere else. It has no way to see them and would not report them if it could.
• Anything about the market. The word counts describe this site, and this site is the only thing they describe.

The page count is easy: the all panels page lists every one, and the footer index on every page lists them too. Count them and you should reach the same figure.

The word counts take longer and work the same way. The exact rule is written out on the how the numbers are made page, including how headings and list items are treated, which is where any difference between your count and this one will come from.

Does the page count include this page?

Yes. Every entry in the registry counts, including reference pages and the front page.

Why compute on every request rather than once?

Because a value computed once and stored can stop matching what it describes without anybody noticing. Recomputing makes that impossible.