The Unofficial WordPress Undiscovered Club

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 It has been replaced by Discover – a slick, modern online magazine.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 club, use the comment section below to state your unqualifications (first, and foremost, you must never have been featured on Discover.) You may also decide to volunteer for a position of your choice.

You might want to download the Unfeatured Undiscovered Club Badge to display on your blog. (I put mine on my ‘About’ page, along with all my other unprestigious awards.)

Be sure to tell all your Undiscovered blogging friends about our new Club!

In keeping with our general philosophy of “undeserved unknownness“, I refer you to this post that demonstrates the virtues of ‘unning’:
Unsubscribe, Unfollow, Unclutter – It’s UnFriday!

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Transition – Beep Beep Boop is Gone?

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 tunnel, through a crack in the door or the flash of an idea, it is always there, heralding a new beginning.
– Teresa Tsalaky, The Transition Witness –

This week’s WordPress Photo Challenge is: Transition.

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WordPress Bloggers React to the Rainbow Banner

WordPress.com celebrated the US Supreme Court decision (that same-sex couples can marry nationwide) by posting a Rainbow Banner (the LGBT Flag) across the top of every WordPress bloggers ‘My Sites’ and ‘Reader Page’. These are the first pages WordPress bloggers see when they log onto their site. While only they can see it (not their readers), every WordPress.com blogger in the world was presumably seeing the same Rainbow flag.

The response from the WordPress blogging community was immediate, with questions being posted to the WordPress forum: How can I remove this!?

An early response from a WordPress Member was “The rainbow master bar was added in support of the Supreme Court of the United States ruling on same-sex marriage today… However, as this is a polarized issue and the community support forums are not the place to hold such discussions we are closing threads related to the mastbar.”

With that, they closed the topic. As further requests came in, WordPress repeatedly closed each topic after responding with “The banner is temporary. It will eventually be removed. Threads are being closed as the public WordPress.com forum is not the place for these discussions.” In some of the requests, the user simply said the banner was offensive, just as a Swastika banner would be offensive. Others said they would prefer to have an option as to what appeared on the top of those pages. Others weren’t aware of what the banner meant, and though they liked rainbows, they didn’t want one there. Others asked, how long is ‘eventually’?

At this point, I thought the Rainbow banner was one design decision that WordPress hadn’t thought out very carefully. They chose to impose their support, and an implied solidarity, onto every WordPress.com blogger. Many of these bloggers were quick to object to that kind of forced compliance and rightfully so.

One forum moderator responded to the bloggers objections by saying, they thought everyone who posted a protest on the forum was a hater. Hater? Everyone? I object to the banner, but I’m not a hater. I simply object to not having a choice as to whether I want to fly a particular flag. There are lots of flags and graphics I would object to – not out of hate – just a desire to have  control of the design in the ‘living room’ of my blog. I think WordPress made two errors – one in their disrespect for their user base by posting the banner, and the other in the way they responded to the users when they objected.

What do you think?

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

Why I reblogged Al’s post: When I was Freshly Pressed, I had to kick myself out of The Never Been Freshly Pressed Club. Without consulting anyone, I dictatorially selected Al at the cvillean to take over the position of President. This reblog is Al’s Acceptance Speech. I hope all WordPress Bloggers will go to Al’s blog and join the Club, follow his blog, and throw buckets of praise at him because he is one very nice person.

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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…

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My Freshly Pressed Natural Disaster

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 I posted the stories that no one else in the Google World had picked up on – the Flooding on the Siksika Nation and Hidden Valley.

Continuing on from left to right, you can see what happened when The Mainstream Media finally picked up on the story. Freefall! When you get to the fourth bar from the right – that is where I was Freshly Pressed.

As if the loss of our entire Community in a flood wasn’t tragic enough, I must now announce my voluntary resignation as President of the “Never Been Freshly Pressed” (NBFP) Club. (It was very short sighted of me not to proclaim myself  LIFETIME PRESIDENT.)

We are going to need a new President, and because I am the Founder of the Club, I am quite prepared to stalk and bring down the person who I feel would be best qualified to carry on the traditions we don’t really have, but would have if we should ever need them.

It is with great pleasure that I dictatorially proclaim our Treasurer, Al, of the blog thecvillean, as our new President. Now, I know that Al is not a Canadian, and he is, well, a man. But he has worked very hard to manage our dark chocolate fund and I think his dedication should be recognized and rewarded. Congratulations, Al!

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.
– Rosalynn Carter –

As a NBFP Alumnus, I promise to sink back into relative obscurity. I promise to continue to write in the mediocre style that is my trademark. I promise to continue to overuse exclamation marks! And I promise to keep looking at life from the sunny side of the street.

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The Unofficial WordPress ‘Never Been Freshly Pressed’ Club

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 know the benefits of Never Being Freshly Pressed, but let me itemize them for you (this is why I am President – I am organized too):

• no long lines of strangers hanging about your blog hoping to cash in on your fame
• no feelings of inadequacy if you don’t get Freshly Pressed again
• no depression when your site stats slip back to normal
• no need to live up to your past fame

Of course, the NBFP Club will be more than just a virtual reality. I’ve found us a clubhouse.

I know it doesn’t look all that good right now…

But my contractors assure me that with just a few renovations, this is what our place could look like. I think the restaurant and patio will be wonderful!

Since the inauguration of our club, we’ve rounded up a few bloggers who are eager to serve on our Board. The good thing about our Club is that anyone can be on the Board simply by volunteering to fill a position that they invent. How cool is that!

UPDATE:  It is with extreme sadness that I announce I was Freshly Pressed on July 9, 2013. I therefore announce my resignation as President, though I will still retain my title of Founder and First President.

Our New President is Al at thecvillean . Previous to this, Al was our very capable Treasurer. If you would like to join the NBFP Club, head over to his blog.

Farewell all and Happy Blogging!

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Press Release from The Never Been Freshly Pressed Club

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.

Steve with A Broken Heart because he 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 those rules written. Note to Membership – please nominate a secretary.)

I’m sorry Steve, but you will have to remove your belongings from the Club locker room. I’m going to have to suspend your bar and dining privileges too. (Note to Club House Manager – do we have a location for the Club yet? Note to Membership – hire a Club Manager.)

On the bright side, that means someone gets Steve’s parking stall.

Life goes on. Let me introduce you to some of the remaining members of our Club:

• Al at thecvillean.  Al is blunt in describing his feelings about the WordPress FP editors: “When the intellectual powers that be at WordPress FP gather together to beatify a subscriber, please just put away the dartboard and actually read one of my posts.”

• The self described ‘disjointed and somewhat snide’ blogger at Pouring My Art Out is pragmatic: “I have as much chance of being ‘freshly pressed’ as Dick Cheney has of being voted People Magazine’s ‘sexiest man alive’”.

• Christine at The Good Stuff writes, “I just started my 2012 day timer with that freshly pressed paper smell” – In our club, Freshly pressed means different things to different people.

• L8n at Back Road Scholar. L8n is well connected. If anyone can find us a club house, L8n can.

• Me. I wrote about the probability of being Freshly Pressed in a post called So You’ve Never Been Freshly Pressed. I compared it to a lottery, but it isn’t. It is a competition with no fixed rules where there are winners and losers and no one really understands the how or why of any of it. As one Freshly Pressed Blogger said about being selected, “here was a post that was far from my favourite in terms of creativity and flow. It didn’t even contain any of my own pictures!”

Contrast that to all the benefits of the NBFP Club –  no long lines of strangers hanging about your blog hoping to cash in on your fame; no feelings of inadequacy if you don’t get Freshly Pressed again; and no depression when your site stats slip back to normal.

If you are an overlooked, under appreciated blogger and  you would like to join our club, head over to the home of our new President, Al, at thecivillean so that your name can be added to our roster. You will have to take an Oath of Allegiance… once we get one written.

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