On or about October 30, 2006 I began a freebie account on Wordpress, to experiment with publishing editorial content and running a content-driven site apart from my usual dead sea blogs, and to more familiarize myself with that style of publishing. It worked out pretty well. Several of my posts went wild with hits and generated loads of conversations in comments, particularly of content which explained a pop culture confusion. As of writing (2025-1219), it has garnered 3.199 million views, the majority split between English-dominated countries: US (1.59m), GB (254k), CA (162k), and AU (116k) according to my flag counter.

A bunch of my posts were debunking common Facebook trends going around, throwing my two cents into the ring for a popular topic of the moment that I hadn't heard many others say, or unpopular positions on older subjects (like that switching on the Monty Hall Problem provides no benefit with elaborate reasons that were never really addressed elsewhere that I could find, and that the flawed inclusion of the elimination round in trials is where the entirety of the switching “evidence” comes from, rather than recognition that the elimination round is meaningless, which I still stand by). I feel like I must be one of the few sites, if not among the first, if not the first, who included “Here's Why” in the headline, because only after I began doing it for a while, did I ever notice any others doing it.

My main strategy to get hits on the ablestmage press, at the time, was playing into Google's then SEO algorithm, of putting sites which were updated frequently to the front pages of search results. I could schedule a month's worth of posts ahead of time, and designed writing prompts based on an image I would deep link (a practice now frowned upon), so every day the site would update and maintain my SEO positioning. I could then occasionally post a real article whenever the fancy struck, and bob's your uncle.

Seeing the decent popularity of posts after a few years, I made the tough decision (and ultimately bad choice) to try to migrate a bunch of that content to my own domain with my own wordpress installation, with its own google adsense account to potentially capitalize on that popularity. Alas, the new installation did not catch on well, and my decision to truncate my original posts with “read more” links to the new site, did not fare well for the original, and the views tanked and stayed tanked, and it never really recovered after that.

Prescriptively, divvyry uses the -ry suffix for “practice of” (such as falconry) appended to divvy, meaning to disperse, separate, or divide, like how you might divvy out the spoils of a treasure discovery among the pirates. It was going to be my brand for a game some call “word mining” where you take a large word and find smaller words within, limited by the availability of letters within the larger, meaning essentially 'the practice of divvying' like distributing words.

I wanted to back up several of those posts here, minus the image portions of the originals, plus add some commentary to my experience with those posts over the years.