It’s been a few months now since I started this site. I waited till I had ten posts before I pressed the Publish button, and I’ve added another twenty posts since then. Early days still, but I see some themes developing, and I’m starting to see the topics I want to explore.

Very early on, I decided this was a blog in which I would tell the stories of my photographs and I think, mostly, I’ve done that. Portfolio sites are – frankly – mostly pretty boring. They’re useful, of course, as a shop window for commercial photographers. And undoubtedly many portfolio sites are very attractive to look at. But there’s often very little reason to return to a portfolio site. If you really want to follow a photographer there are other ways to do it – via Instagram, Facebook, or even Flickr.

Storytelling, on the other hand, is endlessly fascinating. We all love a good story, and even a fairly bland photograph can be of interest once you know the story behind it.

So here we are. Six months in from that day when I sat down at my kitchen table to write my first blog post. My biggest challenge has been, frankly, technical. I didn’t expect this. In my working life I was a wiki administrator, so I was well used to navigating, updating, and generally managing a cloud-hosted content management system. Unfortunately WordPress, it turns out, is way more complex than Confluence ever was.

Last week, finally, I got the blog navigation to work out (mostly) how I wanted it. My next task is to get to grips with featured images. At the moment, the blog is a mix of posts that do and don’t have featured images and, bluntly, it’s a mess. Maybe it doesn’t matter much at the moment but hopefully, as the blog continues to grow, in around a year’s time there will be around 100 posts to explore. And the current mess with featured images simply isn’t scalable.

Oh well. The writing part is usually pretty straightforward. The photography isn’t a problem – it’s the whole reason why I’m here. But managing the blog. Hey, that’s difficult!