Weekly Writing Challenge: In An Instagram

No matter how long you’ve been blogging, there is always more to learn. As part of the Weekly Writing Challenges, once a month, we’ll be highlighting a feature in the WordPress.com Dashboard and challenging you to incorporate it into your blog. We want to help you take full advantage of all the tools available on WordPress.com to make your blog the best it can be  — and to make your friends jealous of your web wizardry. 

To participate, tag your posts with “DPchallenge” or leave a link to your post in the comments. Please be sure your post has been specifically written in response to this challenge; obvious attempts to link-bait will be deleted. We’ll keep an eye on the tag and highlight some of our favorites on Freshly Pressed each Friday.

---

Last week, Cheri announced a new WordPress.com feature: Instagram embeds. If you haven’t heard of it, or aren’t using it, Instagram is a social networking service much like Twitter, except instead of text, you share images.

I, for one, am a big fan of Instagram. The filters are kitschy and cute, and the concept of sharing moments captured via camera phone is endearing. Scenes of friends traveling together, your favorite meal, a new addition to your family: moments like these are often best captured in a snapshot, preserving all of the minute details and smiling faces forever.

Just as we can suspend a moment in time by snapping a photograph, an instant can change our lives forever. For this week’s writing challenge: tell us about a moment when your life was changed in a split second. The good, the bad, the funny, and the thought-provoking, our lives are composed of a series of meaningful events that help to shape who we are. Every now and then, we get a wake-up call where a snap decision or revelation changes our perspective completely.

As someone in the United States, seeing the photos of New York and New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy immediately got me thinking about being thankful and what my priorities are.

For an advanced writing challenge, try to incorporate the new Instagram embeds into your post to help illustrate the story that you choose to share. (For step by step instructions, be sure to check out our new Support document on Instagram.) Don’t have an Instagram account of your own, but want to try out this slick new feature? Check out the Instagram Blog for highlights of excellent shots from around the web.

If you need any assistance, please leave a comment — we’ll be here and ready to help.

P.S. We promised to tell you the true story behind the photo in last week’s Weekly Writing Challenge. Many of you were wonderfully creative in your interpretations, which made selecting this week’s Freshly Pressed posts very difficult.

Here’s the real deal: it’s a photo of Michelle’s father, brother, and sister getting ready to go to church in Jersey City, New Jersey in early Spring 1961. Rumor has it that although her father was a happy man, he didn’t start smiling in photographs until about 1982.