Believe it or not, today is the first year anniversary for the Daily Photography web site. What started as an excuse to force me to use my digital camera more frequently has led towards urban exploration, macro photography and the wide world of photoblogs. And still, I blame (in a good way) my friend Donna for causing all this to happen when she pointed me towards a macro on the Daily Dose of Imagery site just over a year ago.

Today's image is a visual history of the Daily Photography site and the abandoned building Galleries. The two sets of tiles represent every photo posted on the site over the past year. In total, that's 730 photos (phew!).

For today, I'll use this space to describe some of the stats and events the site has endured over this time. If you have no interest in the stats, you can stop reading now. :)

Highest Ranked Photos (by visitors)

Highest Commented Photos

Some of My Favourites (in no particular order)

Unique Visitors and Bandwidth

The number of unique visitors to the site has grown slowly but steadily. And with this, so has bandwidth usage - luckily slowly enough that I haven't yet encountered any of those hideous 'exceeded bandwidth' charges. Currently the site is averaging about 300 unique visitors per day and serves about 4-6 gb of data per month. Two notable events occurred at the end of October which helped drive some further traffic to the site (and just about overload my bandwidth allowance). The CBC Radio 3 issue at the end of October featured photos from my abandoned buildings galleries which resulted in a small increase in visitors. But it was a link from boingboing.net which caused a massive spike on November 1st. Over 3,500 new visitors arrived that day alone and by the end of the week, the galleries home page had received over 5,500 new visitors. This explains why the site bandwidth tripled in November - most of it happened in the first two days of the month.

Additionally, it appears that this caused a number of people to add the site to their 'my.yahoo' settings because now the majority of site referrals come from 'my.yahoo'. I'm sure this is thanks to the boingboing.net link.

Visitor Comments and Feedback

Most of the commenting activity happened during August - a period in which I was posting updates to the galleries more frequently (and generally having a good run of subject matter). I think it was photos from the Abandoned Quarry gallery which really kicked that off.

Spam Commenting

Only four so far... one while I was in Arizona, and three in the past week — but I'm expecting the onslaught at some point. The only saving grace is since I wrote the code for the site I should be able to protect against it fairly easily. Or just turn off the comments.

The Galleries

Discovering the Wychwood TTC Barns during Doors Open 2004 opened up the entire world or urban exploration for me and initiated the Galleries section of the site. This has turned out to be the part of the site I enjoy creating the most. Some of the sites I've visited are well known and popular (for example, Whitby Psychiatric) and that's reflected by the quantity of visitors who've come to see those galleries.

RSS Feed

I'm surprised by how many people are subscribed to the RSS/syndication feature of the site (that little orange XML icon in the top right corner of the page). When I added that feature in May, the feed received just over 200 hits during the month. In November it was requested over 14,000 times. And yet, I have yet to hear from someone about it specifically so I can only assume that it's working well, and providing enough information for anyone using it.

The Tale of the Tape

What's Next?

Looking over the work of the past year I feel I've improved as a photographer. However, I'm also able to see that I can still easily post crap and not realize it until it has been posted. I guess that's the nature of an amateur with a daily deadline - that's just the way it is. I'm far more interested in covering a complete documentation of abandoned locations rather than doing the daily photography exercise, and as such I'm not sure whether I'll keep this part of the site going (or rather, if I'll update it as frequently). That's an undecided item — presently I just don't get the same satisfaction that I do from the abandoned buildings. And hey, it's a lot of work — these days my time is stretched fairly thin as it is.

I can't begin to say how appreciative I am of everyone who's visited the site, those who keep coming back and especially those who take the time to provide some feedback — whether it's written comments or simply notching a vote for a photo. Ideally I'd like to see more critical commentary about the photos, but I realize that's not an easy task and some people are leery of leaving 'negative-sounding' comments. Constructive criticism is encouraged! Seven years of design criticism from pretentious architecture critics (and student wannabe professors) have given me a semi-thick skin. :)

So, there's work yet to do on the site. There are features to add, code to write, and certainly photos to shoot. But for the next few days I may be taking a break. One year is over, and it's been both exhilarating and exhausting. Thanks to everyone who has made this an enjoyable adventure!

Update 9:50am: Lovely. One hour after I made this post, the site went offline for 12 hours. Sigh.