All posts tagged: WordPress

Your Blog – What Do Your Visitors See?

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I give my blog a make-over now and then. (WordPress.com has so many themes to try). When I test drive a new one, I ask a few friends to let me know what their browser thinks of the change. Does my blog load fairly fast on their computer, phone or other device? Can they read the blog easily? Does anything seem to be ‘broken’? Why does speed matter? We might live in a fast paced world, but our internet connections vary from rabbit to turtle. I sometimes have a frog connection – fast leaps alternating with “really, you’ve stopped completely!?” pauses. A fast website loads completely in my browser while my frog is leaping. I can read the site while my frog has stopped to admire the scenery. A slow website doesn’t load completely during the leaps. I often get tired of waiting and abandon the site. Apparently search engines also use load speed as one of the factors in search ranking. You can test the speed of your site with a free tool called …

The Unofficial WordPress Undiscovered Club

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Maybe you remember “The Never Been Freshly Pressed” Club (NBFP). I started it in 2013 because there were so many of us WordPress.com  bloggers who had never been ‘pressed‘. (‘Freshly Pressed’ was a WordPress magazine, of sorts, that featured the writings of every day bloggers.) ‘Freshly Pressed’ has been allowed to die. It has been replaced by Discover – a slick, modern online magazine. The editors select content from about  53 million posts per month, so the chances of your post being chosen are still quite slim, but if you do get selected, you get to put a badge on your sidebar! After almost seven years of blogging, I believe I have demonstrated an inability to be slick or modern – therefore I am, by extension, Undiscoverable. For that reason, I think I can safely form the Undiscovered Club, and proclaim myself  President of the Canadian chapter. Should he accept, Al at thecvillean is my choice for President of the American chapter. (He is current President of NBFP.) If you would like to join our …

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Transition – Beep Beep Boop is Gone?

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The dawn of a new day. If there are clouds, then a sunrise can be a remarkably beautiful transition from dark to light. Perhaps our blogging hosts, WordPress.com, were thinking of dawn when they recently unveiled the New High Speed Editor. I certainly thought they had made a few improvements since they first introduced the ‘New Editor’. It loads so fast that the ever so unpopular, wait while I’m working, ‘Beep Boop Boop’ screen is gone! Another plus – images can be dragged and dropped from your desktop right into your post. Unfortunately, the new editor is still in transition – the search feature for creating links to my old posts is missing. How long will it take before this transitional editor is finished? Or will it ever be? Will we still have access to the good old editor that many or us prefer, or will it eventually disappear? It is like asking, ‘Will there be a beautiful sunrise tomorrow morning’. No one really knows. Light precedes every transition. Whether at the end of a …

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It took a while……… but I’ve finally arrived.

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Originally posted on The Cvillean:
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” – Henry David Thoreau “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” – William Shakespeare  “Twelfth Night” “Great men need great events.” – unknown author (although it might have been me) Before this month, I fell squarely in the first quote category. Now I am honored to say I am one of those who has had greatness thrust upon him. For those who do not know, I am a member of a club which was founded by a fascinating blogger, Margie, at As iAge. The club is aptly named “Never Been Freshly Pressed” and membership is very exclusive. There are only around 400,000 potential members. Margie was not only the founder, but self-appointed President as well. Earlier this month, Margie found herself in the embarrassing position of having been Freshly Pressed. According to the club’s by-laws (which exist only in verbal form), this immediately disqualified her as a member, not to mention her…

My Freshly Pressed Natural Disaster

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Michelle, a well meaning WordPress Story Wrangler, chose my post ‘Hidden Valley – A Community Lost’  for the honour of being Freshly Pressed. Michelle had been following the story of  the flooding of our community, and she thought it deserved a wider audience. Unfortunately, most of the Freshly Pressed readers didn’t agree. They weren’t as drawn to a story that was tagged ‘Natural Disaster’ as they were to – well – just about every other post that day… or week… or month probably. So much for my expectations of Freshly Pressed fame! I don’t, of course, blame WordPress for my somewhat dismal showing. All my long time, loyal readers (and you know who you six are!) will want to know about the meteorical rise in Viewer Stats that comes with being Freshly Pressed. I’m going to satisfy your curiosity by inserting a clip from my stats page. On the far left you will see a very, very short bar, which is my usual readership. The next three bars are what happened to my readership when …

The Unofficial WordPress ‘Never Been Freshly Pressed’ Club

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So You’ve Never Been Freshly Pressed! Then it is your lucky day, because you qualify for membership in the NBFP Club.  Yes, there are other bloggers just like you who have chosen WordPress.com but WordPress.com hasn’t chosen you… or them… By my estimation, (and by virtue of my self appointed rank of President of NBFP I am authorized to do estimates) 99.9986% of WordPress bloggers have not, and never will be Freshly Pressed. Don’t ask me how I came to that conclusion. It is advanced math and like WordPress, I am not at liberty to tell you how and why I do what I do. Rest assured, however, that no matter how many of your fellow bloggers get Freshly Pressed and no matter how many of your fellow Bloggers are Freshly Pressed on numerous occasions, they still are a very small minority. There are, you see,  nearly 40 million new posts each and every month for WordPress to choose from! I’m sure you are as excited about the NBFP Club as I am. You already …

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Press Release from The Never Been Freshly Pressed Club

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I was just putting the finishing touches on a post about all my blogging friends who have never been ‘Freshly Pressed‘. I was thinking it would be appropriate to form a group of ‘Never Been Freshly Pressed’ (NBFP) bloggers, perhaps design our own badge to put in a widget on our sidebar – celebrate our status as the underdogs. I think everyone roots for the underdog. – Johnny Knoxville I was going to link to some of my fellow underdogs and the first on my list was Steve at The Brown Road Chronicles. He recently wrote about how he has skirted around accusations that he has used the banned substance called ‘Freshlypresstosterone’ in an attempt to achieve Freshly Pressed fame. I guess the drug finally worked –  yesterday Steve was Freshly Pressed. Congratulations Steve – but as self proclaimed President of the NBFP, I’m going to have to kick you out of our club. It breaks my heart to have to do it, but rules are rules. (Note to the Club Secretary – please get …

Responsive to Change – My Cat and Wordpress Themes

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It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. – Charles Darwin – This is Mooch. He is a very large cat (see story The Cat Compendium) that may not be the brightest bulb in the box, but he certainly was extremely responsive to change. It took him about a nanosecond to accept that he no longer lived at our house and had been adopted by the people next door. But Mooch isn’t what this story is really about. This is about my blog, and your blog, and how everyone reads our blogs. Surveys suggest that nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds. But there is more: people no longer just use their desk top or laptop computers to read our blogs. More and more people are using their phones or digital tablets to view our ever so entertaining stories. And did …

I’m Blue – WordPress Sometimes Sucks the Joy Out of Blogging

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Actually, the Photo Challenge this week was simply the word Blue, but I’m feeling Blue so that is what today’s post will be about. It has been one of those weeks. Nothing bad happened, but a series of little things coincided with a shift in the ‘feel fine’ chemical brew that keeps me on an even keel. The result is, and always has been, several days of living with a black cloud hanging right over my head. Not an awesomely beautiful black cloud like the ones I sometimes see in the blue morning sky over the hay field. No, a dismal, dull black cloud that wants to suck the life out of everything.  (If you are into Harry Potter, think dementors, only not quite as evil as that.) But bad enough that a small feast of chocolate does nothing to lift me out of morose. (And it didn’t help my mood at all to watch the season finale of NCIS last night, either. It looks like Ducky has met his demise. Trust television to make …

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Reblogging and Image Copyright – Part 2

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I’m not going to pretend I have never violated someones copyright. If I was to follow the strictest terms of the law, then I should include the author and source document of each Quotation I use. I should not have  photographed my Daffy Duck shirt and blogged about it. I’m also a bit unclear as to whether the graphics I bought from The Print Shop can be used on my blog or not… I am, however, a bit touchy about the issue of other bloggers using my Photographs without permission. In a previous post, When Does Reblogging Violate Copyright?, I mentioned that one of my posts had been reblogged. I complained to WordPress about two things: 1. The reblog contained one of my photos, used without my permission. 2. The site that reblogged my post seemed to consist entirely of reblogged posts, without a single word of original content. I haven’t received a reply from WordPress about my complaint, but when I checked the offending blog today, I saw that WordPress had dealt with the …

When Does Reblogging and Pinning Things Violate Copyright?

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Reblogging We All Like to Reblog by Andy P, WordPress.com, June 1, 2010 Have you ever come across a blog post that you enjoyed so much you wanted to easily share it with the readers of your own blog? Sure, you can copy and paste the link and perhaps even a snippet of text with your own comments, but overall it’s not a particularly enjoyable experience. We wanted to change this and make sharing other posts with your readers as easy as posting to your blog. On December 5, 2011, I got a notice that one of my posts had been Reblogged. When I clicked the link that pointed to the site that had reblogged me, this image is what I saw: In the case of this particular post, the reblog contained about half of what I said, plus one of my photos in its original size. The Blogger that copied my post did not add any of their own content. I was not asked for, nor did I give permission for someone to copy and post one of …

The WordPress Snub – So You’ve Never Been Freshly Pressed

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Freshly Pressed – to a WordPress Blogger, it is like winning the lottery. It puts your little blog on the Freshly Pressed Home Page, and that brings thousands of readers to your door. What are your chances of being Freshly Pressed? I think you have – well, I’m not sure what your odds are, but there are about 50 posts chosen from approximately 59,000,000 posts written each month. That is an awful lot of posts to choose from, which is why being selected has a lot to do with luck. The Freshly Pressed posts are chosen by reviewing the Tags that you add to your posts. These tags are gathered up and displayed on tag pages which link back to the posts. Certain tags are chosen from these pages, I guess, and the posts with those tags are the ones that will be reviewed. There will still be an awful lot of posts to choose from, so they are weeded out by picking the ones with clever headlines. What is clever? That is a tricky …

Choosing a Wordpress.com Theme

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If you are using the free version of WordPress.com, you know there are a certain number of Themes to choose from. Some themes can be customized considerably, and some are quite fixed. I have tried a great number of these themes, and have not settled on any one as being perfect for me. The following are some of my thoughts on choosing themes: 1. I have several blogs. Some are mostly photos, and some are mostly writing. I prefer a darker theme for the photo blog, because I think the photos look better on a darker background. The dark background necessitates white print, which I think is harder to read. So I wouldn’t choose a dark background theme for a writing blog. 2. I think Categories are the best way to navigate my blogs. So I want the Categories Widget to be on a sidebar, either to the left, or the right of my posts. I don’t want the Categories to be way down at the bottom in the footer. I also wouldn’t choose single …