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.

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

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

Bloggers made use of the CDPB Facebook group to keep in touch and the regular 1st of the month themes were and still are hosted on the CDPB Theme Day blog.

A group of members developed a new CDPB Portal. Although in some ways not as sophisticated, nor as comprehensive as the previous portal, it was set up to keep the fracturing community together. Even though Eric retired his Paris blog on 1st January 2015 the community continues to survive and flourish.

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. It includes blogs that vaguely follow Eric's original concept, whether members of the CDPB family or not.

In order to keep the workload manageable, I periodically delete dead and spasmodically posting blogs and am only adding new blogs who take time to contact me personally through either through the CDPB Facebook group or one of my own blogs.