Ten Years

Every year on January 14th I like to mark the anniversary of the setting up of this site with a little acknowledgement post. But amazingly, it has been ten years since I first set up this site, so I felt that warranted a slightly longer, more detailed moment of reflection, since I haven’t done that sort of thing in a while.

I started this site on a bit of a whim in 2011. I’m still not really sure what happened at the start of 2011 that gave me the motivation to set it up and start posting but it was likely related to the bicycle I got for Christmas. Those initial months were pretty productive, with as many as 10 posts in a month – pretty much unheard of at the moment. Back then they really were Creative Splurges, I’d try something, edit the pictures and have them posted by the next day, no matter when it was.

I obviously haven’t maintained that level of posting over the last decade. Motivation is fleeting, and so, it turns out, is discipline, which between them are responsible for most of the posts on this site.

I never intended for Creative Splurges to be a purely photography site. At the time I set it up I was bitten by a major creative bug and envisioned the site having creative writing, videography, artwork, and even perhaps physical works such as clay sculptures. In the end, photography proved to me my main love, and although I have had a few posts of creative writing, drawings and videos, the site is about 99% photography.

Since it’s my tenth anniversary I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the stats for the last decade.

Most Popular Post

Undoubtedly Borough Market, because it featured on WordPress’s Freshly Pressed, their sort of ‘front page’ where they featured a daily selection of what they considered the best content on their platform. That has skewed my stat averages ever since, as about 50% of the views this site has ever had came in the month that I was featured.

Most Organically Popular Post

Aside from that one post with artificially inflated stats for spending a weekend in front of readers of the largest network of websites on the planet, my most popular post is Boscastle Pottery. It is slowly catching up on Borough Market and has over five times the views of any other post I’ve ever made. I put this down to the fact that this little pottery shop in Cornwall is relatively well known but doesn’t have any sort of web presence of their own, which has led to a few of the images from that post showing up on internet image searches. It’s even led to a few comments from people asking questions of the pottery, apparently mistaking me for the potter.

Favourite Post

Including retrospective posts such as this one, I have posted over 300 times on this site, so picking just one is a big ask. So instead, I will post my top five posts, in no particular order, even though the list is numbered (and not including Borough Market or Boscastle Pottery which would otherwise be on this list).

1. London Fashion Weekend
2. West End Wander
3. Greenwood Dance Show 2014
4. Return to Borough Market
5. RTX London 2017

I was also tempted to make a ‘favourite photo’ award but frankly there’s too many to choose from.

Some Other Rough Stats I Haven’t Had Time to Research Properly

• Total Photos Taken: 50,000+
• Total Computer Storage Used for Raw Photos: 1TB+
• Total Photos Uploded: 8,500
• Total website space used for compressed photos: 5.3GB

So what for 2021? As you may have seen from the increase in posts at the end of 2020, I am working on posting again, having used the extra time afforded me by working from home to edit the thousands of images I’d been neglecting. It isn’t quite that simple any more, however, because whilst I still have many many posts to bring you, I find myself with less time and energy all of a sudden because at the end of last year my wife and I welcomed our first child into the world, and we’re still very much in the first weeks where sleep and free time are fleeting. Indeed, I had a planned roundup post for 2020 but in all the excitement of the child’s arrival it was left half-finished. My next post is written and ready to go but after that we’ll see how things go.

So given I usually end these posts with a selfie, I will end with what is technically a selfie even though I’m not exactly the main subject of the image.

Happy 2021 and thank you, as always, for reading.