About six thirty. But in all seriousness you may have noticed the time that is appended to the top of each of my blogs along the lines of “~2 minutes 50 seconds reading”. This is an approximated reading time for that particular blog.
Why?
I decided to add this to each of my posts after seeing them on the GitHub guides pages (https://guides.github.com/). It got me thinking about how often I look at a blog post and don't read past the first few lines because I see how long it is. Most of the time that length wouldn't equate to more than a few minutes reading, but in this fast paced world where micro-blogging is king that doesn’t seem to register. I then reflected on the fact that I had more often read the post when told before hand roughly how long I'd be reading it for, so the decision to implement it myself seemed like a no brainer.
How?
I did a little reading and found that the average reading time on a screen is about 200 word per minute. I then wrote myself a little script in Python that I can just plug the blog into and have it spit out the reading time.
#!/usr/bin/python3
from math import floor
text = input("Paste text...\n").strip().split(" ")
if len(text)/200 < 1:
print("~%d seconds reading" % (float(len(text))*0.3))
else:
print("~%d minutes %d seconds reading" % (floor(len(text)/float(200)), ((len(text)/float(200))-floor(len(text)/float(200)))*60))
It's a bit dirty, but it gets the job done. I had it set to support both minutes and seconds because some of my blogs (looking at you book reviews) otherwise read as 0.28 minutes which is just silly.