What a year this has been for me and blogging. One year ago today I never expected to go where I have now gone in the blogosphere. I actually started a few attempts with Blogger and tumblr. Both sites were named after one of my dogs, “Dork”, who is a “lethal white” Aussie. Born completely deaf and blind in one eye, he is a genetic failure due to breeding a merle to a merle patterned dogs. I will still occasionally post an image on tumblr.
YouTube
In early 2011, during the Egyptian uprising, I was creating videos from news clips of Egypt and Libya, putting to music, and uploading to YouTube. Primarily for learning purposes. Editing, keying, masking, yada yada yada. I befriended another YouTuber who was doing the same out of Canada. Eventually, his videos and chatting back and forth led me to his WordPress blog. In wanting to “Like” one of his posts, I had to create a login, so I did. I had that for a few months and finally decided, “What the hell,” and decided to make one more attempt at blogging.
Thus was born Motley News
The original name of this site was “In Search of the Truth.” But I didn’t like it. I love the news, but also like stories of interest, humor, photography, and dogs. A variety. So started Googling synonyms to “variety” and found motley. Hmmmm… kinda like the ring to that. And Motley News was born.
mot·ley [mot-lee] adjective
1. exhibiting great diversity of elements: a motley crowd. Synonyms: heterogenous, varied, diverse, mixed, assorted, sundry; incongruous, disparate, diversified, dissimilar, divergent. Antonyms: homogeneous, uniform, identical; similar, like.
2. being of different colors combined: a motley flower border. Synonyms: parti-colored, multicolored, variegated, polychromatic; pied, piebald, mottled, dappled. Antonyms: monochromatic; solid. [From Dictionary.com]
WordPress Blogging Addiction
As I’m sure all blogs do, my site has certainly changed from what it was like when I started to now. Immediately upon my first post, I was addicted! The stats page is what locked it in for me. I became completely and utterly fascinated with watching the numbers. Not necessarily from an egotistical standpoint, but because people-watching fascinates me (but we all do love and hope we get tons of hits – come on, admit it). I love analyzing what types of posts brought traffic, what didn’t.
The google search results were/are completely intriguing – and I know I’m not the only one here as I have read several bloggers posts about the odd search results that come to their site. I find the spam more interesting and the one that always cracks me up is “…love your site, and have bookmarked it….” Bookmarked it? Hmmmm… if it’s that great, why don’t you SUBSCRIBE! Oh, yeah… because you’re not human.
Shy? Who? Me???? Nawww…..
For months, nearly all my posts were copy and paste of what was in the news. I was a bit shy and definitely not confident at all in my writing skills, and I also didn’t want to offend anyone (yeah, you can all chuckle now at that one).
Over time, my shyness wore off, and I decided that I’m not writing to win a Pulitzer Prize for Journalism. With gaining frequently I started voicing my own opinions and summaries. I am most definitely a progressive liberal and an activist who firmly believes in equal rights. Now, I never publish a post that is a copy/paste. Especially with the primaries and all the b.s. going on in our country and government, there’s sooooo much good stuff to rant about these days.
It’s a Motley World
I also created another site only about dogs called, “Doggie Bloggie.” It’s still there, but I no longer post on it because in September, I decided to go WP.org. Basically, I built a little mini “Motley empire” after I bought the domains motleydogs.com, motleyphotos.net and motleyvideos.com. I moved Doggie Bloggie to Motley Dogs. I was active on them all at first, but right now they’re in limbo as I’m going to redesign all three. The fewer posts I have to go through to tweak, the better. I’ve started on Motley Dogs, but have a long way to go. I’ve been a bit busy building some business sites for other people in addition to working a full-time job.
So, here are some stats and facts about Motley News.
• Total number of posts: 939 including this post
• Total views since the birth of Motley News: 494,422
• Hits on my busiest day: 55,812
(This is because I had an Occupy Wall Street photo which someone posted the link to on Reddit.)
Top five posts:
Number 1: Home page 86,207 hits
Number 2: More dramatic photos from Occupy Wall Street NY | Occupy Wall Streets spreads to San Francisco 38,974
(Naturally because of that Reddit link)
Number 3: Ultimate Dog Tease: Viral video of talking dog who didn’t get his meat… but the cat did… 12,428 hits
Number 4: Miscellany Vol. 1 12,428 hits
Number 5: Occupy Wall Street organizing all over the US… and WORLD! 8,827 hits
Currently, I average between 3,000 to 4,000 hits per day, although lately I’ve been surpassing the 4k mark. My post “Can You Solve This Problem?” has been very popular since publishing. I guess a lot of people aren’t able to solve it so they’re googling for the answer.
An interesting fact about one of my posts:
Insomnia, currently with 4,235 hits. Nearly every morning when I get up and check my stats, this is in the top 3 posts hit over night. Man… I can feel your pain, insomniacs. I was suffering from a horrible case of insomnia the night I published that one.
Top five searches that come to Motley News:
Number 1: “funny pictures with captions” 5,562
(I have learned that good titles to images can really increase the traffic to a site. I have nearly 13,000 hits from Google image search alone.)
Number 2: “costa concordia” 4,380
Number 3: “insomnia” 2,068
(See… told ya so)
Number 4: “lt. john pike” 1,384
(Remember, the pepper spray cop. I posted a lot of his memes)
Number 5: “red hot chili peppers” 1,373
Some interesting search terms that I’m not sure why they come to Motley News:
• mum
• tap water
• the word will not destroyed
• candy
• самые длинные ногти (translation: the longest fingernails) Actually, I have a post about the longest fingernails, but thought it was interesting that there are so many searched in Russian… ??
Well, there you have it. The evolution of Motley News in a rather large nutshell, perhaps a walnut… ?? Hope you hung in there and made it to this point.
One last item I really want to mention here at my closing… When I first started blogging on WordPress.com, I knew nothing about the blogging community. Then around October last year, I started checking out other sites, subscribing, and several did so in return. It was then I realized that I ADORE the WP blogging community even more than blogging itself.
So… Cheers! Here’s to a hopefully wonderful second year of Motley News! (crap, that reminds me… I need to renew my domain…)
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Motley News 
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