I was thrilled to see that WordPress is bringing back its “Freshly Pressed” feature!

For quite a while now, it has seemed to me like the “social” end of the WordPress experience has been dying. Most of the bloggers I began following years ago have stopped posting, and it has become harder and harder to find new blogs to follow, reducing my WP “Reader” feed to a mere, paltry shadow of its formerly robust daily array of blog posts featuring philosophical essays, book/movie reviews, photography galleries, cooking how-tos, artists’ behind-the-scenes, personal journals, and anonymous online diaries.

All the great OG types of blogs that once flourished in the pre-Substack era.

Blogs!

Not “newsletters.”

It has also been a little dismaying that at the very same time I was mourning my slowly deteriorating feed of imaginative daily content coming through my WP Reader, WordPress seemed intent on mimicking the Substack model by publishing supportive posts for WordPress users on how to produce “newsletters” to send to “subscribers” and how to “promote growth” by engaging with the Blaze ad platform and marketing their “content” by paying for visibility.

Nothing wrong with that, of course! But this “hustle bro” vibe is certainly very different from the more “social” experience of the WordPress blogging community I joined back in early 2012.

Back then I was always looking for new blogs, new voices, new creative online friends. And the WordPress home page at that time featured a list of 19 “Freshly Pressed” blogs per day, rotating in new posts as the older posts dropped out, that were like the best of the best from the week. If you were looking for quality writing about interesting topics, here was a great place to find it. I discovered lots of great blogs and bloggers to follow from the old WordPress home page. My WP Reader was overflowing with posts. Every morning brought new voices with  blog posts that were thoughtful, entertaining, informative, and aesthetically beautiful.

Much to my astonishment, I was fortunate enough to have one of my own posts, “Jonah Lehrer and the ‘marvellous Boy,'” singled out by the WordPress editorial curation team for Freshly Pressed status. My brief moment of WordPress “fame” was both thrilling and overwhelming. (And sad, as well, because my recognition arose from a post I wrote about something disastrous career-wise for a writer I admired.)

I’m not usually a person who collects achievement “badges,” mostly because badges are an artifact of gaming culture, foreign to me as a product of the pre-videogame era. The whole “gamification” angle underlying so much of the UX of almost every digital experience just kind of turns me off. I like doing things because I like doing them. The added layer of “achievement” and leveling up is, for me, an unwelcome distraction. In fact, years ago they (previous adminstration at my university) tried to give digital badges to faculty for engaging with a certain interface at work, like we would have badges displayed on our faculty profiles, and most everyone rebelled and refused to engage until the “reward” went away. Because, really, isn’t there something a bit juvenile and unprofessional about earning and displaying badges for properly doing one’s job. (Opinion is definitely my own, of course 🙂 )

And yet.

Despite having said all that, I did choose to display the “Freshly Pressed” badge from WordPress on my blog!

A screenshot of my very own “Freshly Pressed” badge from my 2012 post, “Jonah Lehrer, and the ‘marvellous Boy‘”

I had worked hard on that post, felt proud of my work, and was very gratified that WordPress editors had NOTICED and chosen it to represent the “ideal” of quality writing.

Even once “Freshly Pressed” had faded away, so that most people visiting my blog would have no idea what it meant, I never did take that badge down. I liked it. It made me remember those shiny early days of blogging and how exciting it was to have someone “like” my posts or even better, leave a comment on one of them. And having that vestige of “old” WordPress was kind of a nod to other blogging survivors like me, a recognition of kindred spirits, a wink conveying an insider’s sense of IYKYK.

So everyone pay attention!

Link HERE to bookmark the Freshly Pressed page now, before you forget 🙂