As you may have noticed, my blog isn’t specifically about Arsenal or football or me as a person, it’s more or less about all three: my daily relationship with Arsenal which takes place in an environment of, well, football. I’m finding that many inputs of my daily life have inspired blog posts. One evening last week, for example, both kids and husband were out of the house. I sat down to WordPress, learning a feature I hadn’t used before. I spent tons of time on it, and when my husband came home and asked what I’d been up to that night, I explained that I’d wasted my whole evening blogging. He pointed out that I used to spend my time watching HGTV. That was the inspiration for I’ve moved on, Drew and Jonathan, funnily enough, the most widely read post I’ve made to date. Jonathan and Drew are everybody’s guilty pleasure, it turns out.

In that post, I recounted how I came to start this blog. It was not the result of deep soul searching. Nor was my selection of WordPress as blogging software.  I read one review, opened their website, signed up, started working. I found that WordPress had a lot of content and help to get me started, and as I’ve used the software, I’ve learned much about the features that help me tell a story.

Today’s post is inspired by a feature of WordPress. WordPress has a Stats view that enables you to understand a bit about the people who read your blog, how many have logged in, how many posts they read and which ones, where in the world they reside. It’s fun to look at the information, but absorbing the information also helps understand how to position content and use social media and other strategies to improve readership. For example, one day my sister shared one of my posts on Facebook with a nice recommendation. That produced many readers, and a review of the Stats page demonstrated that most of the readers had specifically come from clicking from Facebook. That group also read many posts. Other friends have also shared posts using Facebook, and I’ve found that sharing by different people produces different results. Some produce many clicks, but not many views, meaning the clickers are either disinterested in the content (not surprising, it’s not for everyone) or it hasn’t occurred to them that there is more to read. So a goal is to have support from more people like my sister. People who have associates who are voracious readers.

One of the Stats features in WordPress identifies when readers come from using search engines. I can see the search engine they used (Bing, Yahoo, Google, Feedly, etc.) and it will also purportedly show what search terms were entered that produced the view. Almost every explanation to date of the search terms used has been “Unknown Search Terms.”  I did get one hit based on someone entering “Barclays Asia Cup” in a search engine a few weeks ago when I covered that friendly tournament in my post, Solidarity.

Earlier this week, I wrote a post called Singing our unsung heroes. In the post, I talked about Arsenal defenders including Nacho Monreal, and I had a small bit in the post about rude puns relating to Francis Coquelin’s last name when shortened. Looking at the stats for that post the next day, I could see that one hit had occurred from a Bing search. What made me laugh out loud was that the search terms that had produced the hit, for only the second time clearly identified, was “nacho monreal puns.”

Yes, somewhere out there in the world, and I had hits from Thailand, US, UK, and Germany that day, someone had somehow, lacking their own ideas, perhaps, become inspired to find puns from the internet about Nacho Monreal.

I tried to get into that person’s head. Were they a reporter who had been chastised because his writing did not include enough puns? Were they heading to a party and needed to freshen up some of their party schtick? Were they trying to impress a clever colleague? Were they engaging in a mental challenge to find a pun for every single player in the English Premier League? And why Nacho Monreal? A wonderful player but not someone who immediately suggests the need for a pun.

I can’t know their motivation, but when my blog came up in Bing they clicked the link….only to read and go unsatisfied, so bereft of Nacho Monreal puns was my post.  Their disappointment has become my disappointment. My post left them wanting.

And now when I think about it, should they be a serial seeker of Nacho Monreal puns, tomorrow they may plug the same search term in, find this post, and be disappointed again. Although I don’t want that to happen, I can see why knowing a Nacho Monreal pun is very difficult because I can’t think of anything very worthy. I even tried to google it myself to no avail. Best I have: that’s Nacho ball! Get it? Not your ball? Ok, it’s terrible. Worse than nothing. How about this: he’s such a nacho man. No? *sigh*

Further, maybe the person will click on the post and dolefully note that they were demoted for not coming up with a suitable pun in their latest article, or were a disaster at the party, or were scorned by their erudite colleague. Or they gave up on their Premier League pun challenge and began making chains out of gum wrappers instead. Or maybe, just maybe, they found exactly what they needed elsewhere. “I’ve moved on Amy O. Today I need Nacho Monreal limericks, or haiku.”

OK, then I’m game!

A Nacho Monreal limerick:

A right back whose first name is Nacho

Hails from the land of gazpacho

He defends and marauds

To that we applaud

Well he passes and dribbles and trots so

More limericks?

A defender named Monreal

Does his job and occasionally enthralls

He stops them from shooting

Calmly gives it a booting

He’s no friend of the man with the ball.

Haiku?

Nacho Monreal

We are exposed at the back.

He covers our ass.

To the person using Bing to come up with Nacho Monreal puns, the guy seeking Nacho Monreal poetry thanks you.