Yesterday, a curious thing happened. I checked my site stats and saw that one of my old posts had just gotten seventeen hits. It was a post I had written back in February, and it wasn’t a particularly good post. Adequate, but not one of my best. Why would so many people choose to read a post from several months ago when yesterday’s post (Role Reversal) was so much better. In fact, it is one of my favorites.
The mystery deepened. I clicked on “Manage Comments” and received a comment from a blogger (The Simple Life of a Country Man’s Wife) who said she’d seen that old post on Freshly Pressed. In fact, it was through Freshly Pressed that she found my blog. She wrote her comment and went back to Freshly Pressed, and WHOOSH! I was gone. Seriously!
Now, if you’ve been Freshly Pressed, congratulations! I, on the other hand, have never been Freshly Pressed. I have longed for that moment, begged for that moment, drooled for that moment, and when it finally came, WordPress chose a crummy old post about a grandmother potty mouth when there were so many good ones they could have picked from, like Second Sight, or Love, Young and Old, or Why Don’t You Act Your Age? to name just a few. To add insult to injury, I never even got to see it before it disappeared.
WordPress, you owe me an apology! Do not toy with someone who is suffering from a declining amygdala (see yesterday’s post)! Common decency would dictate that you feature this post on Freshly Pressed and let it stay as long as the other recipients of that honor. What’s fair is fair.
Coming East 
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I think it has something to do with what tags are on a post… Don’t know if that’s helpful or not!
I’ll never be freshly pressed as (currently anyway) I use categories rather than tags as tags take people outside of ones blog and categories (mostly) don’t. But anyway, most people I know who’ve made it to Freshly pressed have had only momentary ‘fame’ and then people stopped visiting them again. It’s all a bit too fickle for me.
You should be Freshly Pressed, though! The only reason I think it’s a good thing is because it gives you more traffic, and some of the new visitors might end up being permanent. But you aren’t the first one to tell me that most of those visitors were a one-time thing. Since I started trying to post nearly every day, I’m getting a lot more traffic, so I think that’s one of the keys.
I’ve never been Freshly Pressed, and though I would like to be, I think the Freshly Pressed Editor and her Happiness Engineers (if she has some) have the strangest way of picking posts. I wrote a post about not getting freshly pressed (http://gogreygirl.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/so-youve-never-been-freshly-pressed/) and it is one of my more popular posts, so I’d say a good many people wonder what it takes to be one of the chosen few!
I agree! The WordPress people say your blog has to have a catchy title (one of mine was “The Rack and Other Instruments of Torture”) and has to be well-written with few grammatical errors. I’ve read many, many, many or “the Chosen” that met neither of those criteria. Go figure. I’m looking forward to reading you blog. Thanks for taking the time to comment.
Let me get this straight … they Freshly Pressed an old post? I always thought the selected posts just published. For what it’s worth, when I was FP’d, it was hardly my favorite either. It was a lightweight post about reading the Sunday Funnies when I was a kid, appropriately called Sunday Funnies. While it was a kick to get three thousand views, very few readers hung around for any length of time … I’m inclined to think because they chose such an innocuous post. I was intrigued that your daughter’s been FP’d more than once and seems to have a system. I’d written it off as a random long shot. Yes, WordPress owes you. It is a rush although like cocaine, it wears off pretty fast and leves you wanting more.
I’d like to get a chance to feel that rush, though! Oh, well. Maybe my time will come.
I’m with cbeck! And for all of your other outstanding posts! How frustrating. I wish readers could vote for who gets “freshly pressed”.
You just did! Thanks a bunch! My loyal readers are who matters.
Well if that’s not a bummer… at least you know what an amygdala is. I motion that you get freshly pressed for that fact alone!
I’m all for it! Thanks for your comment. Somehow, it made me feel better!