Readability Tester
I’ve been reading a lot of blogs lately and was wondering what the average blog’s readability was compared to say, the New York Times, or even the USA Today. I figured I could write a little spider to crawl a blog and calculate these statistics, but I never got around to it. Then yesterday I came across an interesting post discussing the ideal length of a blog post, and was inspired. So now, I present to you my Blog Readability Tester (I figured the name Charlotte was appropriate since she’s a spider that likes words).

The spider will crawl the most recent articles from your feed (up to 20) and calculate your blog’s average wordcount, average syllables per word, average words per sentence, its Flesch-Kincaid readability index and grade level, and its Gunning-Fog index. It will also calculate these statistics for each post.

If you’re not sure what all this means, here’s passage from Wikipedia’s article on the Flesch-Kincaid reading ease metric:

As a rule of thumb, scores of 90.0–100.0 are considered easily understandable by an average 5th grader. 8th and 9th grade students could easily understand passages with a score of 60–70, and passages with results of 0–30 are best understood by college graduates. Reader’s Digest magazine has a readability index of about 65, Time magazine scores about 52, and the Harvard Law Review has a general readability score in the low 30s. The highest readability score possible is 121 (every sentence consisting of a one-syllable word); theoretically there is no lower bound on the score — this sentence, for example, taken as a reading passage unto itself, has a readability score of 26.7.

My blog comes in at around 45, but I think my code examples throw things off a bit.

Thanks to problogger for finding the link. And if you’re still wondering, your average blog post is 652 words (that’s actually a bit high since the spider had some trouble with your layout). I’d also like to thank Dave Child over at I Love Jack Daniels whose implementation notes for the Flesch-Kincaid and Gunning-Fog calculations were invaluable.

If the tool doesn’t work for you please let me know (leave a comment), and bear with me as I work all the kinks out.