Around the World

The City Daily Photo collection of blogs really began with Eric Tenin in March 2005 when he launched his Paris – One Photo A Day blog. It attracted thousands of readers from the world over who had either been to Paris and wanted to re-live their experience; others who had never been but dreamt of visiting, and those who were planning a trip and surfed the site for interesting things to see.

The blog name was changed to Paris Daily Photo and became so popular, that suddenly others started writing to Eric asking how they could start a similar blog for their own city.

As conceived by Eric, the CDPB concept required that bloggers should

• post one photo a day, though not necessarily one taken that day.
• include a short caption describing the place, the situation, and sometimes a little history.
• the captions should be in English as a minimum, and sometimes in the native language.
• the blogger should ideally be living in the city they photograph and write about, so that they can share their perspective, although they do not have to be a native of that country.
• the name of the city should be included in the title of the blog.

By early 2006 there were some thirty or so sites involved, ranging from large cities to quite small towns. A mailing list and a forum were organised to enable participating blog authors to communicate with each other and discuss relevant matters. The blogs all linked to each other. A links page was kept on a Wiki page so that each could copy/paste a standard set of links.

Not all blog authors could (or wanted to) adhere to all the stipulations of Eric's concept; in particular that of posting every single day. For a time, there developed two lists; the DP list of blogs that more or less followed the rules explicitly and the CDP list of more spasmodically posting sites. DPs that didn't post for a week were moved to the CDP list and sites that stopped posting after a month were removed altogether. Some blogs moved regularly between the two lists. Keeping up with all the changes was, of course, time consuming and many blog authors were very slow to update links.

As the number of sites grew past 50, 100, 200, 500 it became increasingly more difficult to visit all the sites regularly. For a time, there was a web ring, but that is no longer in operation. What then developed was the City Daily Photoblog Portal.

The portal allowed visitors to view thumbnails of the latest pictures posted by registered sites. It included a forum for regular visitors which incorporated the old blog-authors-only forum. The database was updated regularly and new postings appeared quickly.

One outcome of the portal was that instead of static lists, needing regularly updating, participating sites now included a link to the portal and dynamic drop-down menus with up-to-date lists of active blogs. For many authors that allowed them to provide a cleaner looking link to the other sites and one that is updated automatically.

The downside to the dynamic menus available from the portal was that they naturally excluded blogs that were temporarily unavailable (late posting, rss-feed problems &c) and they didn't include a number of excellent sites (some even pre-dating Eric's Paris DP) that, for whatever reason, weren't members of the CDPB portal.

The original portal operated from 2006 until mid-June 2012. It was maintained by two volunteers but after some hosting issues the developers were unable to dedicate the time to retrieving the data structure of the site.

As a temporary measure bloggers made use of the CDPB Facebook group to keep in touch and the regular 1st of the month themes were hosted on the CDPB Theme Day blog.

The new CDPB Portal is entirely a newly constructed creature which is not as sophisticated, nor as comprehensive. However, the three developers are all existing members, and think it paramount that something was set up to keep the fracturing community together. Sophistication can come later.

My guide here started out as both a record of old blogs and a listing of new blogs. Although arising originally from the City Daily Photo Blog lists this is an independent publication.

Here I tried to include all blogs that vaguely followed Eric's original concept, whether members of the CDPB family or not.

However in order to keep the workload manageable, for some time now I've been deleting dead and spasmodically posting blogs and am only adding new blogs who contact me personally through the CDPB Facebook group.