Last month, we interviewed forum volunteer Sergio Ortega (airodyssey). Today, we’re excited to introduce another prolific volunteer: Mike Brough (auxclass, also known as captnmike). We asked him a bit about himself, how he got involved in the forums, and his tips for getting and providing great support.

You’ve been writing about boating safety for over five years. Tell us about your site, how you got started, and why you chose WordPress.com.

My site about boating safety tips, captnmike.com, dates back to August 2008, when the previous owner did not renew the domain name. (Editor’s note: we strongly urge our users to renew their domains in a timely fashion, because once they expire, it can be difficult to regain use of them!) I bought the domain name on a whim, not knowing what I was going to do with it, but it was too good to pass up. I created a very basic HTML site and installed WordPress software because it came free with the hosting account. At the time, I had no idea what a blog was, and I knew nothing about WordPress.

I put some content onto my WordPress install, but only started adding things seriously after I saw that my new post was crawled by Google in just two-and-a-half hours after being published, while a new HTML article hadn’t been crawled in three days. In October 2010, I moved my entire site to WordPress.com and mapped the captnmike.com domain name.

The biggest reason for the move was that on WordPress.com, all the “under the hood” stuff was taken care of. It was a lot easier, and I saved some money, even with the upgrades and keeping my email with my old host. I also like WordPress.com because of its many free features, support forums, solid hosting, ability to handle more traffic, and because I can use it for a site, not just a blog.

How did you first get involved in the WordPress.com forums?

I helped in the WordPress.org forums before moving here (see the modest 600 or so assists from Saildude), so I kept helping, just in a different forum. I used the WordPress.com forums to figure out how to do a few things when I first moved my blog. I found that most of the questions had been asked and answered before, so I learned a lot by reading the previously posted threads. I was able to find answers simply by reading, which was quicker than posting my own question. So I started helping, with no real big plan.

You’ve posted over 12,000 replies in the WordPress.com forums since 2010. We thank you for your awesome support! What kinds of questions do you like answering, and what do you find the most rewarding about contributing to the forums?

Recently, I’ve been answering mostly domain mapping and renewal questions. Many of these questions require some research to figure out what the real problem is: for example, doing a whois lookup to see the domain name’s status, or reviewing the Domain Helper to check on mapping.

What’s been the most rewarding? Finding the two words in a question that everyone else misses and providing a helpful answer. Or deciphering a confusing question and reading between the lines to provide the right answer, even when the person asking the question isn’t sure what help they need.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned from volunteering in the forums?

I’ve been doing field service work and engineering support jobs for most of my life, so I’ve already learned to do research when required and to not reply to a question if I don’t have the answer.

In many of the jobs I’ve had, human error could have led to serious injury, so I’ve had lifelong experience in being extra careful about my work. In comparison, messing up the look of a blog is not much pressure, but I still understand the importance of being knowledgable before tackling an issue.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to get involved in the support forums?

Read the forums for a while to see how they work. Give complete and accurate answers. Links to the proper support documents help.

If you don’t have the answer, consider not replying and instead seeing how another community member handles the issue. You can learn a lot from reading past threads.

Thank you, Mike, for your WordPress.com community support and for taking the time to answer our questions.

Remember, forums are there for the community — this means you. If you have a question, search the forums to find the answer. If you’re knowledgeable about WordPress.com, find an unreplied thread — maybe you’ll be able to help a fellow user.

And Now For Something Completely Different

My point is this — I believe it would be incredibly naive to argue that the Pope’s decision is a reaction to scandal or contemporary issues that face the Church. This is not a cowardly man running away from the moment but an astute leader ensuring that the moment does not run away from his Church.

This week, Pope Benedict XVI surprised the world with his resignation announcement. Readers at What the Blackbird Said appreciated and responded to the intelligent and reverent discussion about this historical moment in the Catholic Church. The piece, a bit on the longer side, is thoughtful and crafted with care. ”It is a heartbreaking decision that is incredibly brave and demonstrates both wisdom and humility. It is an example to all, and inspirationally encouraging in faith.” We also love this blogger’s voice and the variety of topics she tackles on her blog, and this post — quite different from her others — was particularly refreshing.

You Like a Bruce Springsteen T-Shirt in H&M, Then Realize It Isn’t Actually Intended For You

And then it hit me. Standing in H&M, surrounded by H&M’s core demographic, it hit me. This T-shirt wasn’t meant for me.

The forty-something blogger at You Know You’re Over Forty When . . . kept our attention with this humorous yet thoughtful post on finding a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt in the middle of H&M — and quickly realizing it wasn’t meant for her: “It was meant for girls whose parents owned and appreciated Born In The USA. It was meant for girls who probably thought that this was quite amusing.” And while she specifically recalls 1984 when Born In the USA was released — and her first real brush with the album three years after — the nostalgia she whips up in the piece makes us remember moments in our own past, and makes us smile and laugh because we, too, have been confronted with adulthood in similarly amusing ways.

Shoveling My Own Goddamn Driveway

I’ve read posts by dads who praise hired help because it gives them more time with the kids. I can respect that approach. If I had back every hour spent cutting the lawn or shoveling snow, I might have used it to have more fun with my family. . . .

But for me, I like doing it myself. I like the sense of accomplishment, and I like the message it sends to my son.

Undead Dad

In the midst of the recent snowstorm on the East Coast, the writer and father at Undead Dad was able to reflect on what it means to shovel snow out of his family’s driveway, and how much of his pride is tied up in domestic labor. “I like being the one outside working on the house to make life better for the family. I like the idea that my son is watching me work hard, break a sweat, and get a job done.” Eloquent and honest, the post is a great example of what the blog is about: mindful fatherhood in the age of over-work.

Did you read something in the Reader that you think is Freshly Pressed material? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.

Further: with featured content, featured images, pull quotes, and recent posts by format

Further, our latest premium magazine theme, masterfully designed by our very own Takashi Irie offers all of the traditional features you’d expect, in a feature-full, sleek, modern, and beautifully crafted design. This theme is ideal for professional web publishers or content-heavy websites.

The homepage of Further uses a battle-tested layout for magazines with multiple sidebars, and a prominent featured content area at the top. The carefully chosen typography and balanced use of white space provides your readers with expansive content, while maintaining the feeling of a breathable design.

Further is a premium upgrade for your blog; read more about its features on the Theme Showcase, or dive right into previewing it on your blog from Appearance → Themes.

Say ciao to Mi Piace Kate:

“Mi Piace Kate” is Italian for “I Like Kate,” and we definitely do! Kate’s a graphic designer, cat aficionado, and handcrafting devotee who’s taken the free Bueno theme and run with it. Her blog is a stellar example of how some custom images and a $30 Custom Design upgrade can change a free theme into a million-dollar site that’s totally unique.

Take a look at the standard Bueno home page next to Kate’s:

If you didn’t notice the post date in the colored circle (pink in the original; chartreuse in Kate’s update), you might never know that this blog used Bueno. How did she pull it off? Here are a few of her (not-so-secret) techniques:

Custom header

Kate sets the tone with a custom header that both tells the reader a bit about her and the blog and sets the tone design- and color-wise:

Uploading a custom header doesn’t require an upgrade; it’s an option for any Bueno blogger (and for tons of other themes, too — 152, to be exact).

Thinking, “But I’m not a graphic designer”? You don’t need to be! Create some simple text in your word processing program of choice and save it as an image, or use a favorite photo that has meaning for you. Voilà! Instant personality.

Custom colors

Kate takes the colors introduced in the header and weaves them throughout the site, from the colored circle around the post date to the lines under her widget titles. She’s doing this via the Custom Design upgrade, which lets her pick the exact shades she loves and use CSS to apply them specifically where she’d like.

If you’re not loving the stock Bueno pink but the idea of CSS gives you the heebie-jeebies, we’ve got you covered: Bueno comes with seven different color schemes you can activate with a click by heading to Appearance → Theme Options, and you can use the Custom Design upgrade to change the colors of fonts and backgrounds even more, no CSS necessary. (If you want to dip your toe into the CSS pool, here’s a primer.)

Custom fonts

The bold fonts are what draw a lot of you to Bueno in the first place, but if you’re digging the Bueno layout and would like a different font look, the Custom Design upgrade lets you do that. On Mi Piace Kate, Kate’s opted to use the classic serif font Ambroise for headers and post titles, easy-to-read Museo Sans for regular post text, and the slender and elegant Raleway for titles and menu options. If you’re interested in exploring custom fonts, check out how a few other bloggers are using them and learn how to preview them for your own site.

Fun with text widgets

Kate wasn’t afraid to get under the hood and wrangle her widgets to get the exact look she wanted. Check out how she’s styled her blogroll, right. She’s changed it from a simple one-blog-per-line list to something with a different kind of visual interest that gels with the clean but playful look she uses across the blog.

How’d she do it? By using a Text widget rather than the Links widget most of us use for blogrolls. Since text widgets accept basic HTML, she was able to drop all her links into a widget, separating each with a double backslash. Her custom fonts and colors took care of the rest.

Kate kicks off her sidebar with one of our favorite but underused widgets — a basic text widget with some “about” copy. Again, the widget pulls in all her customizations: colors, text, and CSS, so it’s providing information and context for new visitors to her site while reinforcing the Mi Piace Kate brand.

She’s also customized her widget titles, another of our favorite tweaks: “Links” becomes “I Like to Look,” and “About” becomes “Oh Hello.” No opportunity to inject personality into the blog is overlooked.

(For more on customizing widgets, check out our recent tutorials on working with text widgets and three free ways to customize your blog.)

Kate uses a mix of design- and tech-sense to create a blog that screams “Kate!”, but anyone can personalize their site with standard options like custom headers and creatively-used text widgets, or use the basic click-to-activate features of the Custom Design upgrade to go a step further. She’s definitely inspired us, and we hope she’s done the same for you!

If chosen carefully, a custom background can reveal a lot about your site’s focus, as well as your overall aesthetic. I asked a few users about the backgrounds they’ve uploaded to their sites, and how they chose them:

Gherkins & Tomatoes, Biscuits & Gravy

Cynthia, the writer and photographer behind Gherkins & Tomatoes, Biscuits & Gravy, focuses on the cuisine and rich history of the American South. Her background caught my eye immediately — it enhances and unifies her image-oriented site.

Gherkins & Tomatoes, Biscuits & Gravy

Tell us about your custom background. Why did you choose it?

I downloaded this background from GRSites, which has all sorts of textures. I love the tiled effect with my customized Gridspace theme. I chose this image because it looks like a lot of buildings in the American South, where the weather wreaks havoc with paint on exterior walls, especially old out-of-the-way restaurants. Since my blog primarily covers the food history of the American South, I wanted something that conveyed the time-worn look of the white frame houses so common in the American South, the “homeplace” where so many people remember eating grandma’s cornbread and soup beans, sugary pies, and fluffy cakes.

Got any tips to share with users who want to upload a custom background?

If your blog contains a lot of photos, as mine does, be sure the background doesn’t detract from your main content area. You don’t want things to look too “busy.” The background design should complement everything else that the reader sees. It should also convey something about your blog’s main focus.

I’ve also played around with quite large files for backgrounds and these also work well, provided there are large expanses of color or shapes in the image. Why is this important? If the larger image has too much detail in it, it will tile in such a way that distracts the reader from what you’ve featured on your blog. If, on the other hand, your blog content doesn’t rely so much on photos or graphics, you can use a pretty busy background.

Thanks for your tips, Cynthia!

A Weirder Fetish

The front page of Vanessa’s travel blog, A Weirder Fetish, is packed with photography, from the large featured images in the slider to the thumbnails down the sidebar. Her whimsical, illustrated header is colorful and prominent. So, I like her choice of a subtle, light gray pattern because it doesn’t overpower, yet still adds texture and contributes to her theme of wanderlust and exploration.

A Weirder Fetish

Tell us about your custom background. Why did you choose it?

I chose a group of houses as my custom background, so that the tiled effect would display rows and rows of a closely-knit populated town. It creates the sense that every single place in this world is connected to each other in one way or another — that we are not too different after all. It has always been my dream to travel to places like Italy one day (the streets of Naples, for example). This background also serves as a constant reminder to achieve this dream!

Got any tips to share with users who want to upload a custom background?

Your custom background shouldn’t stand out too much because after all, the main content lies in the posts you upload. A tiled custom background should be kept simple and spaced out so it allows for comfortable reading. Start with something close to the theme you’d like to present. More importantly, choose imagery you really love, for you are possibly the number one visitor of your own blog.

Great advice. Thanks, Vanessa!

Now, it’s your turn!

Most of our themes on WordPress.com allow you to upload a new background image, select an existing image from your Media Library and set it as the background image, or select a color. Go to Appearance » Background in your dashboard. If you don’t see this option, your current theme does not support the custom background feature. But don’t fret — in the Theme Showcase, you can browse the themes that support custom backgrounds.

After you’ve uploaded a background image or selected one from your Media Library, you’ll see Display Options. You can:

• Position your image on the left, center, or right of the page.
• Set your image so it repeats (the “tiled” look that Cynthia and Vanessa describe above) or doesn’t repeat — you can tile the image vertically and horizontally throughout the entire page, tile horizontally only, or tile vertically only.
• Set your background to “scroll” with your content, or stay “fixed” in place when a viewer scrolls down the page, as shown on both Cynthia and Vanessa’s blogs above.

If you don’t want to display an image but still want to transform your background, play around with the color wheel. If you know the exact hexadecimal value of the color you want to use, enter it directly into the color field.

If you prefer to pick a color from the color wheel, click on the Select Color link beside the box, which opens up the color wheel. When you have found the color you want, click Save Changes.

Need inspiration?

Here are examples of other blogs with custom backgrounds:

• Design by Lulu: A pretty site with a matching patterned background and pastel header. In fact, Lindsay’s background is the same image on her business cards. This visual consistency is smart — it makes you and your brand recognizable.
• One Theology: A site focusing on discussions and ideas about theology and philosophy. The black-and-white scheme and uppercase font in the header create a bold and sleek site, and the lettering displayed in the background enhances the design.
• New Girls About Towns: A blog by two gals, Ellie in London and Sara in New York. They take advantage of the Confit theme’s full-page background with bright, playful illustrated city icons that match their site’s custom header. Note: With Confit, an individual page can have its own background image (to do this, just set a featured image to that page).

Don’t have your own image to use and want pattern and texture ideas? In addition to Cynthia’s suggestion, GRSites, poke around on these sites:

• Subtle Patterns
• My Site My Way
• Squidfingers

Mobile notifications

WordPress for iOS connects directly to your WordPress.com blog and shows you the same notifications you get in your WordPress.com toolbar, but with a twist: You also get push notifications for everything happening on your blog. It’s the quickest way to approve or reply to a comment, since you’ll know about it as soon as it’s posted. With the built-in threads, you can easily see any comments your readers are responding to and keep up with conversations in the community. Checking in on your post is just a tap away!

When you get a new follower, or someone likes or reblogs one of your posts, you’re notified as well. The app even sends you notifications for those special days when you’re receiving a lot of traffic. And should it ever get too noisy, you can mute an entire blog or disable certain types of notifications — likes, for example — in the Settings panel.

Download the WordPress app for your device — Learn more about WordPress for iOS

Other ways to get notified

Don’t have an iOS device or just prefer your computer? There are other ways to keep up with your blog.

Browser extensions/add-ons

With a browser extension/add-on, you will be notified whenever someone likes your posts, follows your blog, posts a comment, and more. You can use Press This to blog about interesting things you find online, as well as follow blogs you like, no matter what website you’re browsing.

Get the WordPress.com Chrome extension — Learn more

Get the WordPress.com Firefox add-on — Learn more

WordPress.com on mobile

Did you know that WordPress.com works just as well on your smartphone/tablet as on your computer? Try it now! Go to WordPress.com on your device (don’t forget to add it to the home screen) and browse away. You’ll find all the things you like and use, including a notifications view. Just like with an app or a browser extension/add-on you’ll see all your notifications in one place, including stats highlights and replies to your comments.

Feedback

If you’re interested in our mobile apps and would like to help test and contribute to them, head on over to Make WordPress Mobile where all the magic happens. Be sure to follow @WordPressiOS on Twitter to stay up to date with the latest news about the WordPress for iOS app.

What do you like most about WordPress.com notifications and how do you prefer to read them? Feel free to let us know in the comments.

I was curious to see how painters use WordPress.com as an ultimate canvas to compile and display their masterpieces. If you’re a painter looking for ways to build your online portfolio, find inspiration from these artists:

Fatima Ronquillo

Fatima Ronquillo

Born in the Philippines and now living in New Mexico, self-taught painter Fatima Ronquillo paints classically inspired portraits. Yet her body of work also evokes magical realism — it’s playful and even eerie. Fatima’s gallery of paintings covers seven years (click on “Works” in the menu to browse back to 2007), so take the time to browse her collection. She uses Portfolio, a premium theme in our Theme Showcase.

Fatima Ronquillo 2012 Paintings

Under the “Representation” tab, she’s created pages for her work in galleries in New Mexico, Utah, and Texas; and under “About,” you’ll find links to her biography and a detailed résumé listing past exhibitions and press.

In addition to the evergreen content on these pages, she has a blog, accessible in the main menu. (You can set up your site this way, too; read about the Front Page option on our Support site.) On her blog, she announces exhibitions, shares new paintings, and muses on her craft. And she does so beautifully: in “Love for one’s work,” you’ll see her words are as delicate as her brush strokes:

As for myself, I love my work but rarely do I enjoy it. Drawing is pleasurable because it is immediately gratifying. Perhaps this is why I jealously guard my drawings and am reluctant to show them; they are my private joy. Painting on the other hand is too difficult and slow going. So why do I paint? For the same reason why Proust’s narrator pursues writing: love. If drawing is the seed of an idea, then an oil painting for me is that idea fully realized.

Zany4Days

Zany4Days

The goal is a water colour painting a day, regardless of what’s going on. The purpose is to seek out 20-30 minutes of unplugged quiet time every day. . . . The world around us is getting busier all the time. In what ways might I create that meditative space for myself?

Ian Rosenfeldt approaches Zany4Days as an experiment: to step outside of his comfort zone, to create something artistic on a regular basis, and to carve out personal time each day. He uses a free theme, Hatch, which is perfect for his painting-a-day project. Hatch is a minimal theme, yet the grid-style design displays bold images, and the colors pop against the solid black background.

If you’re interested in creating a visual layout like this using Hatch, you need to set Featured Images in each of your posts. To do this, find the Featured Image module on the bottom right when you’re creating or editing a post and select the image to appear in the grid.

We also like how Ian captures the spiral binding of his notebook in each shot, which creates a visual motif as you scroll down his front page. He’s invited us to peek into his artistic process, page after page. It’s a unique, personal touch.

Maurice Sapiro

Maurice Sapiro

Maurice Sapiro, a longtime painter in Connecticut, paints landscapes, still life, and dreamscapes and uses a customized Nishita theme to display his moody and ethereal pieces, inspired by the outdoors as well as the human figure. The Nishita theme works well with big images — its default “photoblog” layout is super-wide at 1024 pixels, which puts the focus on Maurice’s artwork.

You can also choose between a light and dark color scheme, and here, the white background showcases the delicate shades of his paintings. With large images, the viewer can see and appreciate the subtle layers and technique and movement of his brush.

Unlike Fatima and Ian above, who use a front page-style and grid-like design to present their paintings, Maurice opts for a traditional blog layout. At the top, he has an extensive custom menu to various pages, categories, and custom links to his other sites so you can easily explore his breadth of work spanning 60 years. To start, take a look at his collections of watercolors, “poured paintings,” and skyscapes.

To provide space for his super-wide images, he skips a sidebar but takes advantage of the three widget areas in the footer, using Image Widgets to link to his work on eBay, as well as the Top Posts & Pages, My Community, and Posts I Like Widgets to display notable content and the online network he’s built.

Check out other painters making a splash on WordPress.com:

• Lisa Kairos: Open Studio (encaustic painting, mixed media)
• Joshua Dildine (spray paint, mixed media, acrylic)
• Lina Raymond (acrylic on wood and canvas)
• Art by Ken (abstract and organic mixed media)
• Justin Beckett: Canadian Painter (acrylic landscape and nature)
• Art of Jodi Magi (great use of the tiled gallery on her Paintings and Drawings page)

Want more? Dive into the Painting, Art, Watercolor, and Acrylic topic pages in the WordPress.com Reader.

What’s your role at Automattic?

Ms. Kathryn Presner

As a Happiness Engineer, I help WordPress.com users solve every kind of issue imaginable: from setting up custom menus to custom DNS records.

I love troubleshooting users’ problems and finding solutions — it’s incredibly satisfying seeing someone go from frustrated and confused to delighted and enlightened. I especially enjoy “seeing the lightbulb go off” when explaining WordPress basics to beginners.

The best part of my day is when a user tells me I’ve totally lived up to my Happiness Engineer designation, which — let’s be honest — has to be one of the best titles in the world!

Tell us about a project you’ve worked on recently.

To introduce myself to my Automattic colleagues from around the world at our company meetup last fall, I prepared a presentation called Foods From Québec You May or May Not Have Heard Of… and why you need to try them at least once. It explored everything from tire sur la neige — hot maple syrup taffy poured over snow and twirled around popsicle sticks — to our most well-known export, poutine: a heart-stopping combination of fries, gravy, and cheese curds. I even brought a giant batch of homemade sucre à la crème* (decadent brown sugar fudge) to give people a real taste of Québec.

What have you learned that you can share with WordPress.com users?

Did you know that many cities around the world hold regular get-togethers where you can meet other WordPress enthusiasts in person? I’ve met some of my closest friends and collaborators that way. Try an online search for your-city-or-town WordPress meetup and see what comes up! Some of these groups also run annual events called WordCamps, where you can spend a jam-packed day or two soaking up WordPress goodness and blogging inspiration among folks who love WordPress as much as you do!

What do you love most about working at Automattic?

Every day I feel utterly lucky to be surrounded — virtually — by the most awesome colleagues in the world: funny, kind, smart, and as passionate as I am about helping people with WordPress.

What do you love to do in your spare time?

Top ten things I’m likely to be doing when I’m not on my computer:

1. Cooking or baking delicious food from around the world, from
   Moroccan bread to Ethiopian chicken.
2. Cavorting with my three crazy cats.
3. Trying not to buy more vintage Pyrex mixing bowls at flea markets
   and church bazaars (and, who are we kidding, probably failing).
4. Exploring obscure mom-and-pop restaurants of every stripe.
5. Playing badminton or doing pilates.
6. In summer, thinking up new ideas to foil the vegetable-loving
   squirrels in my backyard garden.
7. In winter, wondering who ever thought colonizing in a city covered in snow five months of the year was a good idea.
8. Attending a weekly movie night with friends — we’ve reached #440.
9. Watching a play or show put on by Montréal’s small English-language theatre community.
10. Traveling to interesting places both close to home and across the world.

*Sucre à la crème is now known around Automattic as the French fudge of the gods. Kathryn is a confectioner par excellence.

Did you know that Automattic is hiring? We want people who are willing to work hard, share their ideas, learn from their colleagues, take initiative to get things done without being told, and those who aren’t afraid to ask questions. Think you fit the bill? Work with us.

Image credit: “Frozen Pizza” by Eric Leamen.

If you’re looking for something to read this week, we’ve picked three posts that share a preoccupation with trying to be authentic in a high-speed world that often demands that we’re anything but. How do you stay true to yourself when the world around you so actively encourages vapid, “phony” responses to seemingly inescapable situations? In three very different posts, this week’s selection of bloggers tackle that question in their own way.

I Confess. I Cheated.

We face these kinds of tough decisions every day, sometimes without even considering the moral and ethical significance. Cheating and getting ahead is the easy decision. Choosing not to cheat is the tough one. However, cheating does, after all, imply getting a competitive advantage. What if you are at a competitive disadvantage if you don’t cheat because everybody else is? It’s easy to justify it in our own heads when we are pursuing our goals to be successful and respected.

DF Salvador’s expansive post on the ethics of cheating to get by, or to become successful, spans from gaming online Scrabble to Lance Armstrong’s dubious decisions on the road to sporting success. At the heart of this post is the thorny question of how, and when, to stay true to oneself even when everyone around us is using artifice and underhand tactics to get ahead. It’s not an easy question, and there are no easy answers, but DF Salvador’s post explores and examines the motivations and societal pressures on all of us to sell ourselves short in the pursuit of success.

The Psychology of Workplace Dynamics: It’s ok to be a phony, as long as it is authentic

Everywhere we turn these days we hear about people “keeping it real.” But which real-self are they keeping true to? This sense of “keeping it real” could in actuality be about projecting that self that is dependent on the social world–An identity that has been constructed just for a public image. So, in reality one would “be keeping it fake real.”

Psychologist Mimi’s post tackles the problem of striving for authenticity in a personal and professional context, when authenticity is very much a social construct that falls apart at the drop of a feather. In a world of mediated experience and media-saturated personalities, is it foolish vanity to attempt to be the “real me”, and if not, what separates that from something altogether more “phony”? From Catcher in the Rye to Kim Kardashian, Psychologist Mimi interrogates our universal quest for authenticity and draws some interesting and unexpected conclusions.

Frozen Pizza: How Instagram And Vine Are Fuelling The Frivolous

Just like my Instagram photos were starting to feel meaningless, so too were most of the “first Vines” I saw posted yesterday. Vines of people Tweeting about Vine. Vines of people making coffee. Vines of people drinking coffee. Vines of dogs. Vines of cats. Vines of people dressed like cats. Vines of a dying Tweetie Bird. Vines of people eating food. I’ve yet to post a Vine, because I feel as if I have nothing Vine-worthy to record.

In Eric Leamen’s post for CE, he reflects on the dangers of the medium becoming the message. Leaman draws on his experiences with Twitter, Instagram, and Twitter’s new 6-second video service Vine to reflect on the impact of feeling perpetually pressured to post something, anything, to social media services. When posting becomes more important than having something significant or meaningful to share, to what extent do we end up sharing vapid, empty, and arguably inauthentic nothings before wondering why nobody seems particularly interested. Eric Leaman explores this idea by way of a piece of frozen pizza.

Did you read something in the WordPress.com Reader that you think is Freshly Pressed material? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.

The Paper-Free Class Experiment

My name is Mr. Hays and I teach 8th grade Language Arts. I am a National Board Certified teacher, and I have been reflecting on my role as a teacher this past summer. This year, I  have decided to try a radically different approach to teaching. I want to step away from the traditional classroom for a while and see just how much we can do online.

With The Paper-Free Class Experiment, Florida middle school English teacher James Hays has built an incredibly robust site with everything from discussion questions to writing resources and test prep materials to a page for communicating with parents. Using the Morning After theme, which allows him to create custom menus and designate sticky posts to highlight important information, he’s created a site that’s packed full of useful information but still easy to navigate.

Along with providing resources, assignments, and a place to continue classroom conversations, The Paper-Free Class Experiment connects to a variety of other online education tools. Students can create their own blogs on edublogs.com (which is powered by WordPress.org), enter private chat rooms, and log into the school district’s own portal to submit assignments electronically — students and parents can even keep up with classroom news on Twitter.

Mr. Hays isn’t only knocking down traditional classroom walls, he’s preparing his students to succeed in a digital age.

English 250 @ Iowa State University

Instructor Jackie Hoermann, who teaches English 250: Written, Oral, Visual, and Electronic Communication at Iowa State University, goes beyond simply using a WordPress.com site to enhance the in-class experience — she requires every student to set up their own site, and their final grade is based in part on their online portfolio.

Using the Grisaille theme, she’s created a clean, focused space for students to interact. Blog posts and tweets keep the class talking between sessions, a custom contact form allows students to submit assignments via Google Docs, and the “Blogs I Follow” widget makes it easy for classmates to find one another’s portfolio sites, along with other sites Ms. Hoermann recommends.

To help students who may have never blogged before, she’s even created a demo portfolio site to walk them through the process. Thanks to the online component, students not only hone their online writing skills, they end the semester with a portfolio they can be proud to show off.

CRS 5th Grade: For All Things Fifth Grade!

Massachusetts fifth grade teachers Rachel Miller and Rachel Kellar are dedicated to making sure parents know what’s going on in the classroom so they can provide the best support at home. With CRS 5th Grade, they both keep parents up to date with administrative details like field trip plans and share day-to-day classroom happenings, fleshing their posts out with images and video to give parents a real feel for what their kids are experiencing.

They’ve got a perfect theme for this in Suburbia — the layout lets them highlight a number of posts on the home page, giving parents the ability to see the breadth of classroom activities with a glance, while a custom background creates a primary school feel. A “Need to know…” page reminds parents of key events, like school closings and upcoming activities.

The two Rachels aren’t the only elementary school teachers keeping parents in the loop via the web. Ms. Turcot’s Blog does the same for her second-grad class, as do the Mountain Brook Presbyterian Preschool and St. Joseph’s Indian School.

Individual educators, schools, and districts are using website and blogs to transform education in a myriad of ways — the flexibility of WordPress.com creates all kinds of opportunities:

• The West Des Moines School District uses a blog to keep their teachers up-to-date with how new technologies can enhance both teaching and administration.
• Roding Valley High School maintains a blog as a place for teachers to share pedagogies and teaching tools with one another.
• William Penn University posts tips and resources for students participating in its study abroad program, since a blog can reach anywhere a wifi signal does.
• High schooler Gordon Lee communicates with students in the middle school mathlete club he coaches on WordPress.com.
• Canada’s Heritage Christian Schools use their website for everything from sharing reading lists to recommending useful educational apps to housing their school wiki.

There are even more sites that we can’t share because their creators have set them to “private,” allowing parents, students, and teachers to keep their conversations out of the public eye — an option with any WordPress.com blog, but one that’s especially attractive for sites with student participants.

If your classroom (or your child’s) is using a website or blog, we’d love to see it — feel free to share in the comments. And stay tuned for new features just for the education space coming next month!