How To Get People To Your Website

Freshly Pressed’s Best Of July 2012

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 10:01 AM PDT

The month of July has come and gone and we featured over 600 posts on Freshly Pressed. So here is a look back at ten of these stories: those we thought were the most interesting and those the WordPress.com community loved and engaged with the most.

• Torridon

Photographer Fraser McAlister shares the shots he took on a trip to Scotland: photos of hills, lakes, insects, and more spotlight the country’s beauty. The unique green/gray palette made this photo series feel visceral.

• Crocheting to Change the Planet

We get a glimpse at the Crochet Coral Reef project in St. Petersburg, Florida and learn about climate change’s effect on the biodiversity of the ocean. And how could you not love jellyfish made of yarn?

• Why Blogging Scares Me

A young blogger shares why she waited a month to put up the first post of her new blog devoted to life and food. Her honesty and openness left an impression on us.

• An Open Letter to Jessica Redfield

Miles Venkman somberly compares his own experience with The Dark Knight Rises to that of the late Sports blogger. The shootings in Aurora left a mark on many communities, including WordPress.

• Dirty Thirty: The List

What would you like to accomplish before you hit the age of 30? One young woman shares her aspirations. Everyone should make lists like this and actually push to fulfill them.

• Why sweat the big things? Worry about the small (really important) stuff.

This food blogger discusses what frustrates him in life, and shares a wonderful and unique sorbet recipe. As before, honest and thought-provoking writings about life really engage people.

• 5 Easy Steps To Make Your Own Blog Header!

Donah takes us through how she created the images that top her blog page. It is a clear tutorial that can be helpful for many bloggers who are looking to improve their pages but aren’t sure how.

• Friday Fifteen

This bibliophile shares with us a handful of 15-word book reviews, focusing on books from the U.K. to celebrate the Olympics. It is a series, so check out his other quick reviews.

• 10 Things That Suck About Being a Guy

This sometimes earnest and sometimes tongue-in-cheek post highlights the pitfalls of masculinity. This post is quite universal; most of us men feel this way at sometime or another.

• The Olympics Are Fabulous (Sometimes)

Lastly, Julia Hass shares her opinion on the Olympics–not the athletes or the sports events, but the teams’ clothes. The nations’ official uniforms were all quite different and quite intriguing.

What were your favorite Freshly Pressed items and blogs posts of the month?

And for those who want more, check out Freshly Pressed, follow our Daily Post writing prompts and challenges, and browse our Recommended Blogs and our blog topics. For more info on how we choose posts for FP, peruse our support documents.

A High Resolution Experience

Posted: 02 Aug 2012 02:55 PM PDT

There’s a new generation of devices really changing how we look at the web, Apple calls it Retina, others call it HiDPI (high dots per inch), but it’s been trickling its way up mostly through mobile phones and then in tablets with the iPad 3.

Basically the idea is that the pixels are so close together you can’t even see them, even if you put your nose right up to the screen. (Wipe off your screen now.) My mind was personally blown when I first saw the new Retina Macbook Pro — basically Apple took the clarity of the retina screen and brought it to full 15″ laptop (which also has amazing other specs) and the result is remarkable. So much so that it ruins you, like the first time you saw a HDTV and then had to look back at a regular one again.

The one disadvantage is that many apps, and most websites, don’t have high-resolution equivalents of all their graphics to take advantage of the new screen, so they get “doubled” and look fuzzy, they stand out like a sore thumb.

You may have noticed that we’ve been going bit by bit through the entire WordPress dashboard, the reader, and all of our sites updating them to take advantage of this new capability, often crafting new icons and graphics by hand. (Go by an Apple store and check out WordPress.com if you want to get a taste of it, but I warn you it’s hard to go back.)

But for you guys we can go a step further. All of your blog posts will now serve high-resolution images for users that can see them, at least the images that we host. Since we create all images dynamically on the fly, what we do is if you’ve uploaded a higher resolution photo and sized it down, we’ll serve a double-size so it looks super sharp to those visitors — they’ll think you’re ahead of the game.

We’ve also completely revamped Gravatar to be Retina-ready, and made it so that all Gravatars across WordPress.com are HiDPI as well.

Here’s how sharp things look on a HiDPI device compared to a regular display:

P.S. We just launched the same available for Jetpack users, our second simulaunch.

RssA1

vineri, 3 august 2012