WordPressmancy will help you brew a successful blog!

Many new bloggers are quickly stymied by not knowing what to write. They’ll stare at a blank page for hours, never understanding that the answer to their dilemma is right at their fingertips.

No, it’s not tasseography, the fine art of reading tea leaves, that I’m talking about. It’s something even better!

WordPress, the blogging juggernaut used by thousands to spew their bleatings upon the cowering masses, wants you to succeed, and has placed a handy divination tool at your disposal. All you need to do is learn how to use it.

Open your blog’s statistics page and go to the heading marked Insights. You’ll see something that looks like this:

If you’re thinking that’s nothing but a list of the days on which I published, put on your tinfoil hat and think again! Just like the tea leaves at the bottom of your cup, the pattern of dots depicted above can give knowledgeable bloggers a sudden burst of needed inspiration.

Let me show you how it works:

What you can clearly see from the image at left is a head of lettuce. That’s what inspired me to write a post about the improper way to eat a sandwich, and let me tell you, that post gained me quite a following among the food-blogger set. But there’s more! Don’t imagine that you have to read the dots as they’re presented by WordPress. Turn the image upside down and that head of lettuce quickly disappears. Instead, what you see is a fallen-down man with a broken leg, and now you know how I came up with the idea to write about what happens when we try to put on our pants with the wrong leg first!

Scrying by WordPress is so much easier than trying to clean up a mess like this!

The art of scrying is nothing new. People have used anything and everything to divine the future, but kudos to WordPress for understanding that the modern blogger might not have access to a steaming pile of sheep guts, or that we might even be too lazy to get off our broadening asses to brew a cup of unstrained tea in order to read the leaves.

Let’s take another example in the art of WordPressmancy, shall we?

Just look at the image at left. What do you see? If you said “unicorn,” you’re still not doing it right. No, in this instance, don’t look at the blue dots, but rather at the gray ones. Oh for crying out loud! It’s a map of Australia, you dummy! And if you turn it 90 degrees to the left, you’ll easily spot the gnome hat with a tassel on the end. Putting all that together is how I knew to consult Dr. Willem Gelding about his research into the dangerous gnomes of the Australian Outback.

That’s enough about the past, you’re probably curious about what’s coming up in the future! I have to tell you, I’m really excited about an article that’s already in the works. When I spotted the image at right, I immediately sent it to staff artist Morgaine du Mer, who saw the same thing I saw in the pixels and drew this picture of a little gnome house in the woods:

The real gnome house depicted in this painting by Morgaine du Mer is located in Tennessee. Where exactly? Well, the GPS coordinates are right there for anyone to see, so if you can’t find it, don’t blame me!

And not only that, if you turn the WordPress gnome house to the left and squint at the image, you’ll find the GPS coordinates for where that house is located in the real world! I’ll tell you right now that it’s somewhere in Tennessee, and one of these days when I get some time off I’m going to find it and write about it. The coordinates are right there at left, and now that you know how to read the images, you very well might beat me to it!

So hey, bloggers, no more staring at a blank page. Ideas are there for the taking, and don’t forget to thank WordPress for handing you the key to future success!