This blog has been going since 28th Feb 2007, such a short time in the scheme of anything, but worth remarking upon since this is the 400th post. There were other blogs before: this whole site moved domains at least twice; there was something on Moveable Type installed by the very lovely (now) professional blogging expert Pete Ashton, and some primitive looking handmade things before that. Just goes to show: nothing ever disappears entirely from the glorious world wide web.
So, 400 posts over roughly 31.5 months = 12.69 posts per month= around 3 posts per week. Crumbs. Especially since there was a long pause whilst the undergraduate wounds were deeply inflicted. And that doesn’t include anything sitting in the drafts box (several words about photos screened in the Baltic, several undergrad progress reports, one or two grumbly things worth keeping but definitely not worth sharing, and few posts taken offline (eg that Boro nuisance). Nor does it include Pages – 20 of them. That feels like a lot of blogging.
Everyone likes statistics. Here are some reader favourites.
Those two have been downloaded a couple of hundred times between them. This is particularly satisfying since the people using the likes of zone rulers and cardboard handmade exposure calculators are definitely The Photography Pages’ kind of people. We love you.
Most downloaded photos:
This one remains overwhelmingly top with downloads in the many hundreds, although since it was linked via the previous domain name, it hasn’t been available for a while. So for all you lovers of layers and car parks, here it is again. It’s not actually a Gursky: you all do know that, don’t you?
Second favourite:
Third:
Lovely women, both. We thank them most kindly! So might you, if you have one of them on your fridge door. After that there are a batch of downloads of tickets and passes for things like Private Views and openings of exhibitions, plus a couple of maps.
Most searched words or phrases
“Children smoking” (and all its variants) is streets ahead. Then model release forms, 35mm camera/s, cross processing, photography degree, and a host of ad hoc film and technique terms. The interest in or disgust about children and smoking far outweighs the furore caused by the Baltic’s censorship of Nan Goldin’s portraits of children, although we were careful to dissuade the spiderbots with unique some changes in spellings.
Most searched people’s names
Michael Ormerod (many from students looking for inspiration for the annual competition for his Trustees’ Award), Graham Stouph, Amanda McHale, Maggie Murray, and just recently a huge number of searches for Antony Chambers, most of them coming from an IP in lovely auld Darlington. Caused such a spike in the stats that it was worth noting as a Facebook update. There was nothing to see here about Antony Chambers, so the link to his website was added in order that this desperate searcher could have somewhere to land.
The Photography Pages doesn’t have a searched-for article or articles about either Graham Stouph or Jacky Longstaff, although that might change, especially if we write about bromoils at some point, since there’s one of Ms Longstaff’s bromoil prints in the gallery at No 7. Amanda McHale’s Dec ‘07 interview is still here, you’ll be glad to know.
Dolores Marat has been searched for a handful of times, by folks looking to find out what kind of camera she used. Makes us all want to crack out the chrome and roam around the Pigalle at midnight.
Browsers
42.2% of readers used some version of Firefox, which is fab because the site renders really well in FF3 and upwards. Download yours HERE. It’s beautiful, it’s free, it’s open source and you can open tabs and add Greasmonkey. Your life will never be the same again. The dismally inferior IE is still strong, probably from old machines or the antediluvian grubby beige-box public sector. Let’s hope it’s all those poor wageslaves having a quiet moment to fulminate about puffing 5 year olds, or to find out how to load grandma’s film camera. Lovely.
Feed Reading
One big change from the early iterations of this blog has been the upsurge in reading via RSS Feeds. Really Simple Syndication was barely known back in 2007, but now it’s pretty certain that most of any blog’s regular readers, you much-loved precious returning visitors, will be looking through their own system, and never visiting the site at all. Tearing one’s hair out about themes, colours, page layout, fonts etc is pretty much redundant these days, thankfully.
Feedburner with its WP plugin handles the post and pages’ RSS feeds, and the numbers are steadily climbing back up to the point they were at in 2008 when the domain names were changed and everyone fell off. Feedburner is also more sophisticated now, so the reader count fluctuates more often. This week it’s rolled around between 65 and 75 readers using feeds, and as you can see the favourite by a long way is now Friend Feed, which has taken over from Google Reader as top. No idea about Toluu – chip in if that’s you. Good to see Bloglines is still alive, though barely, and we don’t know whether that means we’re on 4 blogrolls or there’ve been 4 reads from them today.
FlashGalleries
There are many Lightroom-generated galleries behind the photographs on these pages, so although avid photography consumers do click through to those, they’re outside of the WordPress architecture so the statistics for those are a little more obscure to determine. And they’re in Flash, which is almost universally hated by people looking to buy photographs: gallery owners, collectors, picture libraries, editors and the like. And Flash isn’t supported by the iPhone so we can’t show those galleries to people when we’re on the move.
Hard to know why we like them so much, but we do. Of the people we see “in real life”, these have been popular:
1.Toscani Tested – humble undergraduate essay, worth a mighty 86% from your local semi-sentient tutor/technician. WARNING: If you hand in your work on CDRom or DVD it will be scanned to check for plagiarism, and even if you scramble all the words, it’ll still show as coming from right here. Be careful.
So, maybe there’ll be another roundup in another couple of years, another 400 posts from now. Perhaps by then we’ll all be thinking into a cloud of fairydust or pushing buttons on our cardigans to record the latest brain-blip or Twitter will have taken over the world, or all of the above. In the meantime, and as ever, feel free to Ask Me, if what you’re looking for isn’t here.
400th Post in this Iteration
This blog has been going since 28th Feb 2007, such a short time in the scheme of anything, but worth remarking upon since this is the 400th post. There were other blogs before: this whole site moved domains at least twice; there was something on Moveable Type installed by the very lovely (now) professional blogging expert Pete Ashton, and some primitive looking handmade things before that. Just goes to show: nothing ever disappears entirely from the glorious world wide web.
So, 400 posts over roughly 31.5 months = 12.69 posts per month = around 3 posts per week. Crumbs. Especially since there was a long pause whilst the undergraduate wounds were deeply inflicted. And that doesn’t include anything sitting in the drafts box (several words about photos screened in the Baltic, several undergrad progress reports, one or two grumbly things worth keeping but definitely not worth sharing, and few posts taken offline (eg that Boro nuisance). Nor does it include Pages – 20 of them. That feels like a lot of blogging.
Everyone likes statistics. Here are some reader favourites.
Most downloaded files:
1. The Exposure MAT (.pdf file)
2. This nifty little Zone Ruler
Those two have been downloaded a couple of hundred times between them. This is particularly satisfying since the people using the likes of zone rulers and cardboard handmade exposure calculators are definitely The Photography Pages’ kind of people. We love you.
Most downloaded photos:
This one remains overwhelmingly top with downloads in the many hundreds, although since it was linked via the previous domain name, it hasn’t been available for a while. So for all you lovers of layers and car parks, here it is again. It’s not actually a Gursky: you all do know that, don’t you?
Second favourite:
Third:
Lovely women, both. We thank them most kindly! So might you, if you have one of them on your fridge door. After that there are a batch of downloads of tickets and passes for things like Private Views and openings of exhibitions, plus a couple of maps.
Most searched words or phrases
“Children smoking” (and all its variants) is streets ahead. Then model release forms, 35mm camera/s, cross processing, photography degree, and a host of ad hoc film and technique terms. The interest in or disgust about children and smoking far outweighs the furore caused by the Baltic’s censorship of Nan Goldin’s portraits of children, although we were careful to dissuade the spiderbots with unique some changes in spellings.
Most searched people’s names
Michael Ormerod (many from students looking for inspiration for the annual competition for his Trustees’ Award), Graham Stouph, Amanda McHale, Maggie Murray, and just recently a huge number of searches for Antony Chambers, most of them coming from an IP in lovely auld Darlington. Caused such a spike in the stats that it was worth noting as a Facebook update. There was nothing to see here about Antony Chambers, so the link to his website was added in order that this desperate searcher could have somewhere to land.
The Photography Pages doesn’t have a searched-for article or articles about either Graham Stouph or Jacky Longstaff, although that might change, especially if we write about bromoils at some point, since there’s one of Ms Longstaff’s bromoil prints in the gallery at No 7. Amanda McHale’s Dec ‘07 interview is still here, you’ll be glad to know.
Dolores Marat has been searched for a handful of times, by folks looking to find out what kind of camera she used. Makes us all want to crack out the chrome and roam around the Pigalle at midnight.
Browsers
42.2% of readers used some version of Firefox, which is fab because the site renders really well in FF3 and upwards. Download yours HERE. It’s beautiful, it’s free, it’s open source and you can open tabs and add Greasmonkey. Your life will never be the same again. The dismally inferior IE is still strong, probably from old machines or the antediluvian grubby beige-box public sector. Let’s hope it’s all those poor wageslaves having a quiet moment to fulminate about puffing 5 year olds, or to find out how to load grandma’s film camera. Lovely.
Feed Reading
One big change from the early iterations of this blog has been the upsurge in reading via RSS Feeds. Really Simple Syndication was barely known back in 2007, but now it’s pretty certain that most of any blog’s regular readers, you much-loved precious returning visitors, will be looking through their own system, and never visiting the site at all. Tearing one’s hair out about themes, colours, page layout, fonts etc is pretty much redundant these days, thankfully.
Feedburner with its WP plugin handles the post and pages’ RSS feeds, and the numbers are steadily climbing back up to the point they were at in 2008 when the domain names were changed and everyone fell off. Feedburner is also more sophisticated now, so the reader count fluctuates more often. This week it’s rolled around between 65 and 75 readers using feeds, and as you can see the favourite by a long way is now Friend Feed, which has taken over from Google Reader as top. No idea about Toluu – chip in if that’s you. Good to see Bloglines is still alive, though barely, and we don’t know whether that means we’re on 4 blogrolls or there’ve been 4 reads from them today.
Flash Galleries
There are many Lightroom-generated galleries behind the photographs on these pages, so although avid photography consumers do click through to those, they’re outside of the WordPress architecture so the statistics for those are a little more obscure to determine. And they’re in Flash, which is almost universally hated by people looking to buy photographs: gallery owners, collectors, picture libraries, editors and the like. And Flash isn’t supported by the iPhone so we can’t show those galleries to people when we’re on the move.
Hard to know why we like them so much, but we do. Of the people we see “in real life”, these have been popular:
And this one’s a top referral link:
And finally, the
All time top posts/pages:
Here they are, in reverse order -
10. Michael Ormerod – His Legacy from June 2008
9. Brenda Burrell the tabbed link to my professional site making an impact on the stats for the first time
8. Ephemeral Discourse – a new post this week. Crazy, but true.
7. Eleven iPhone Apps For Photographers this one’s likely to build as the trackbacks gain in traffic
6. What To Do If You Inherit a 35mm Film Camera
5. Alex and the plonkers in the Medway Plod – glad this one’s doing so well. Keep on trucking, Alex!
4. Nineteen Useful Things To Know About Using Slide Film. Yes, people do like lists.
3. Do I Need To Obtain A Model Release? A recent surge of traffic from an airgun user’s bulletin board, would you believe.
2. Priscilla Smoking © Joseph Szabo long after the controversy over dismal photohosts deleting photographs of children with a tab in their pretty little mouths, there is still a very significant interest in this. The photograph doesn’t get lifted, surprisingly enough.
And ta-daaaaa! Number One, by a long, long way:
1. Toscani Tested – humble undergraduate essay, worth a mighty 86% from your local semi-sentient tutor/technician. WARNING: If you hand in your work on CDRom or DVD it will be scanned to check for plagiarism, and even if you scramble all the words, it’ll still show as coming from right here. Be careful.
So, maybe there’ll be another roundup in another couple of years, another 400 posts from now. Perhaps by then we’ll all be thinking into a cloud of fairydust or pushing buttons on our cardigans to record the latest brain-blip or Twitter will have taken over the world, or all of the above. In the meantime, and as ever, feel free to Ask Me, if what you’re looking for isn’t here.
Thank you for reading. We really do love you all.
Similar Posts:
Popularity: 1% [?]