It's been 10 years since I started my blog with “Choosing a Car to Buy in Japan”.

That was followed the same day by “Essentials for a First-Time Parent”, and then another 10 years and 2,327 additional articles (not counting this one 😉) containing 18,133 photos, as well as other little additions such as the interactive map of blog photos and the sporadically-maintained prettiest-photos photostream.

今日は私のブログの十年記念日です。十年間、2,329件、写真18,133枚。

I would have liked to post something spectacular for my tenth-anniversary post, but having just returned to Kyoto from a long trip to The States, I just don't have the energy.

I did, at least, make an attempt to try something new for this anniversary post: to make my first cinemagraph. I figured that this could be a nice complement to my wigglegrams, but my first attempt resulted in failure:

ugly view of what is (please try to believe me) a beautiful scene

The cherry blossoms visible from my balcony are currently in their most exquisitely-beautiful state, infusing a joie de vivre in all who witness them in person, but I just can't capture that sense in photos, and so my cinemagraph was doomed from the start with boring, bland, dull, ugly source material. But maybe I'll learn one day, and perhaps for my 20th-anniversary blog post I'll refer back to this with the same nostalgia that today I have when looking back at my early blog.

Indeed, looking back over the blog's Table of Contents to older articles, I think I've improved in writing and photography. Some of the old stuff is pretty bad.

I'd like to be able to list my “best” articles for the decade, but there's no easy way to understand what “best” means. Looking at which articles have received the most views is not as meaningful as one might expect because it's more of an indication of which articles happened to catch a high-trafficked website's fancy over the years.

Among dated blog posts, the top ones by overall view count:

1. Nikon D3 Shutter Release in Super Slow Motion (Sep 2008)
2. Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote (Sep 2006)
3. Tasty Squid Pizza, and other Culinary Delights (Mar 2007)
4. Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VR Lens (Nov 2006)
5. Jeffrey's Lightroom Configuration Manager (Mar 2007)
6. Finally, Geoencoding in Lightroom! Announcing my GPS-Support Plugin (Oct 2008)

and here is the breakdown by blog year (April though March)...

These are mostly the kind of articles that get found via a web search, or linked from some high-traffic site like Reddit (or in the old days, SlashDot). Folks following a link from these places likely view the one page and leave without even realizing where they were (my blog).

Most of the articles listed above are, in my mind, tangents away from what I feel are the central core of what I want to share, stories about Kyoto, my family, and places I visit. Rummaging through my blog's Table of Contents, I selected a few of the articles that I think are representative....

In random order (mouse-over to see thumbnails for the photos)...

• Prucia Plum Wine from France, and Some Dramatic Lighting, and Rolling-Stones Beer  (Jun 2012)
• Fumie’s New Pointe Shoes  (May 2012)
• All Dressed Up in Kinosaki  (Mar 2009)
• Badass Japanese Archery: Now It’s The Ladies’ Turn  (Jan 2012)
• More Japanese-Garden Desktop Backgrounds from Kyoto’s Enkoji Temple  (Mar 2013)
• Kyoto’s Jidai Matsuri 2012, #2  (Oct 2012)
• Slice of Americana: Anthony’s Cousin is Bat Boy at a Local Baseball Game  (Aug 2013)
• Cliché Incarnate: Lame Formulaic Pictures of Plum Blossoms and Those Enjoying Them  (Apr 2012)
• Deep In The Mountains Above Kyoto’s Kumogahata Village  (Jun 2011)
• Kyoto’s Housen-in Temple Part 3: Rock Garden Desktop Backgrounds  (Feb 2013)
• My First Look at Kendo: Masters Tournament in Kyoto  (May 2014)
• Trying Some Hard-Edged Black and White  (Jun 2011)
• Anthony Growing Up: the Tipping Point  (Apr 2010)
• Presidential Visit means REALLY BIG hubbub  (Nov 2005)
• Dabbling in Some Fine-Art Printing for My Office  (Feb 2011)
• Kyoto At Night During a Heavy Snow  (Jan 2015)
• A Long But Photogenic November in Kyoto  (Dec 2012)
• Taking It Easy With Some Flowers From Kyoto’s Gioji Temple  (Jul 2012)
• Context for the Bamboo-and-Leaf Photo, and Some Crazy Post-Processing  (Dec 2011)
• Fun Day of Snow Play, Snowflake Photography, and Birds  (Jan 2014)
• The Quintessential Anthony  (Dec 2005)
• A Visit to Suntory’s Kyoto Beer Brewery  (Jun 2012)
• Photographer’s Low-Hanging Fruit: a Pretty Flower  (Apr 2012)
• Anthony’s “Adventures of Craneman”, #1  (May 2009)
• Kyoto’s Eikando Temple Continues To Amaze  (Oct 2011)
• Cosina Voigtländer Macro APO-Lanthar 125mm F2.5 SL  (Jul 2010)
• Anthony the Supermodel  (Mar 2006)
• A Bazillion Offering Statuettes at the Sanzen-in Temple  (Jun 2009)
• Goldfinches in a Light Snow  (Jan 2014)
• Going Vertical: Portrait-Mode Desktop Backgrounds  (Nov 2010)
• Amazing Snow at the Heian Shrine  (Feb 2008)
• Big, Moody Space of the Kosan Temple in Northwest Kyoto  (Dec 2011)
• A Wigglegram of Three Lovely Ladies in Kimono at the Kyoto Imperial Palace  (Nov 2014)
• A Superficial Overview of the Gardens Behind the Nishimura Stone-Carving Workshop  (Dec 2009)
• Unusually Dynamic Views of Kyoto from Shogunzuka  (Nov 2011)
• Gioji Temple Photoshoot Continues: Little Orange Mushrooms and Depth-of-Field Comparisons  (Jun 2012)
• Elementary-School Water Polo  (Feb 2013)
• Kyoto’s Amazing Haradanien Garden, Part 3  (May 2013)
• Japan’s First Whisky: Suntory’s “Yamazaki” Distillery  (Apr 2012)
• A Bunch Of Blurry Pictures of Folks Pouring Wine  (May 2012)
• Charcoal Preparation: Monochromatic Work of a Japanese Swordsmith  (Jan 2012)
• Namiko Candid Bride Portrait  (Nov 2010)
• Total Discipline: Anatomy of a Japanese Archer’s Shot  (Jan 2012)
• Sleeping with Curious George: A Short Timeline  (Dec 2009)
• First Look at the Ultra Modern (as in “Modern Art”) Benesse House Museum Hotel  (Oct 2012)
• Setsubun Festival at the Heian Shrine: Intense Burn Continues  (Mar 2012)
• The Towel Museum in Imabari Japan, Part 1  (Apr 2011)
• Ninja  (Jan 2008)
• Elegance in Kyoto’s Tenjyuan Garden  (Nov 2012)
• Views of Kyoto From Shogunzuka Over The Years  (Feb 2013)
• Priceless: Candy and Pottery in a Surprisingly Tasteful Display  (Mar 2013)
• Impossible Shot at Kyoto’s Enkoji Temple: Garden *and* Garden-Viewing Room at the Height of Fall Colors, Devoid of People  (Feb 2013)
• A Visit to the Jikkouin Temple in Rural Kyoto  (Sep 2013)
• Tea and Sweets Among the Fall Colors at Kyoto’s Daihyouin Temple  (Nov 2012)
• Pierre Nadeau, Japanese Swordsmith  (May 2011)
• The Towel Museum in Imabari Japan, Part 2  (Apr 2011)

A separate class of content on my blog are its non-dated “pages”, which each covering a specific topic and are updated in place so they tend to accumulate many more views than the dated articles cited above. Most-viewed pages include those for my Lightroom plugins (#1 and #2 are my plugins for Flickr and Facebook, while #3 is on plugin installation). The most-viewed non-Lightroom pages are for my autofocus test chart and the description of my image-metadata viewer. The ones I'm most proud of, though, due to the work that went into them, are

• An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings
• Digital-Image Color Spaces, Page 1: Introduction
• Jeffrey’s Photoshop Calendar-Template-Building Script
• Jeffrey’s Autofocus Test Chart
• Jeffrey’s Fake-Mat-Building Photoshop Script
• A Qualitative Analysis of NEF Compression

Back to trying to determine the “best” articles, One might look at the number of comments a post receives as proxy for “best”, but this too is skewed away from reality toward utility: the majority of most-commented articles are related to Lightroom. The most-commented blogposts not related to Lightroom include starting with “So Much For That Glorious iPad Screen: iOS and its Apps are Not Even Color Managed” (March 2012) and “Frustration with TracFone Prepaid Wireless” (July 2006).

The “pages” also accumulate more comments... the Flickr-plugin page currently has 696 comments (including a dozen or so I haven't gotten to yet). I need to figure out a better way to manage comments.

I'd like to be able to find out which posts were most appreciated by followers of my blog, but there's no way to know. I provide a full-article RSS feed, so many readers don't even visit my blog to read it.

So, without really knowing what people like, I guess I'll have to continue just doing what I like and hope folks that might enjoy it find their way here.