Freshly Pressed

Firstly, I want to say a quick welcome to the more than eighty new followers I’ve gotten in the last day. Thank you so much for subscribing!

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On Friday, my Borough Market post got ‘Freshly Pressed’. For the uninitiated (and apologies, I know most of my readers are WordPress users, but I still get some hits from my family via Facebook and this won’t make any sense to them otherwise), that means it found its way to the front page of WordPress.com, where any visitor could see it clearly and proudly displayed. It even also had similar positioning on WordPress’s 404 page. High exposure indeed!

It caught me completely by surprise. I had just published my long-overdue post on the England v Wales women’s rugby match (bumped by a few days for the Borough Market post, in fact) when my wife came home from work a little the worse for wear, and virtually passed out on the sofa. So, I headed out to the shops to get some dinner that I could probably cook without starting a fire. As I left, I got a few emails. I checked the preview on my iPhone’s lock screen. “So-and-so liked your post,” it said, and that’s all I could see on the preview. Fair enough, I thought, there were some decent shots in that rugby post and I usually get a like or two pretty soon after posting. I disappeared into the mobile-reception black hole that is the supermarket.

A short while later, I was heading back with some microwavable goodness. Another email or two came in. “Please moderate…” Oh good, I thought, I like it when a post needs moderating, it’s always nice to have a comment from someone who’s not commented before.

I got home, and began to cook the dinner. Beep, went my iPhone. Beep. I had a bit of a closer look. The emails were all about the Borough Market post from two days previously. That’s odd, I thought. Had someone dropped a link on Twitter to the post? It had happened on occasion before when someone with far more followers than me had liked a post enough to share on Twitter.

Whilst I cooked dinner, by which I mean the microwave cooked dinner and I kept an eye on it, emails from WordPress continued to trickle in. a Like here, a comment there. Very odd. What could be causing this, I thought. I looked at my stats. 305 hits for that day, beating my previous record of 217. That’s great, I thought. But why?

I can’t have been Freshly Pressed, can I?

Food prepared, I opened up my laptop, certain that I couldn’t have been.

Wow. I’ll be honest, as much as I had hoped that a post might get Freshly Pressed, I never truly expected it to happen. Not really. It’s taken quite a while to get over the shock of it all, and I’m still, as of writing, getting numerous emails from people liking, commenting or following. Every email means a lot to me, it does, and I’m endeavouring to reply to every comment and, when I get the chance, check out your own blogs.

Since I’m aware that a lot of my readership is now completely new to this blog, I would like to take the time to highlight a few of my favourite posts from the year and a bit that this blog has been running:

Bournemouth Air Festival

A bit of an epic post, fourteen pages and over a hundred images, but there are a lot of shots in there that I am very, very proud of.

Sights and Sounds of London Town

A post much like the Borough Market post, with some attempts at interesting perspectives and post-processing techniques.

March of the Squirrels

One of my wife’s favourite posts, with loads of shots of amazingly tame squirrels.

Playing with Macro

One of my first macro posts, with an interesting array of flowers and those tame squirrels again.

Portraits

A collection of the portrait shots I’ve managed to quietly get of my family, along with a brief followup post.

Return to York House Gardens

Another collection of photos trying to improve on shots I’ve taken before.

Return to the Royal Parks

I do often return to old haunting grounds to try new things in familiar locations.

Various trips to Richmond Park

Richmond Park is pretty close to me and contains a swath of photo opportunities.

You can also check out The Daily Photo, a spinoff blog that posts one of my photos every day.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy these posts – and of course those to come – as much as you did the post that brought you here in the first place.

Cheers

Rob