PetaPixel Turns One Year Old

I started PetaPixel one year ago today during my last few weeks as an undergraduate computer science student at Berkeley. I worked on the blog quite a bit that summer, and in August 2009 I went back to Berkeley for graduate studies in computer science.

Time sure flies by, and I’m graduating with a master’s degree this Sunday. Writing PetaPixel has been an amazing experience so far, and so much has happened in the past year.

When this blog was launched, the focus was more educational, and I tried to write articles to pass on things I’ve learned about photography. Posts ranged from post-processing walkthroughs to guides on how to buy and sell gear on a student budget. We also had weekly interviews with photographers and giveaways semi-regularly.

As grad school became busier, I had less time to do photography, and posts became less frequent on PetaPixel as well. A big turning point came when Jessica Lum, a high school friend of mine, joined PetaPixel as co-editor in November 2009. Sharing the load really helped, and posting has been consistent since then.

Our mission statement is “to inform, educate, and inspire in all things related to photography.” We shifted more towards informing and inspiring in the past few months as my research became busier, but in the future we hope to diversify the content a bit more so that PetaPixel isn’t limited to being simply a news blog on photography.

Starting next week, PetaPixel is going to be my full time job. I can’t really say I’ve quit my job for blogging, since I’ve never had one, but instead of finding some software engineering position somewhere I’m going to be doing this. Coincidentally, I’m leaving Berkeley as Jessica is arriving — she’s entering the Graduate School of Journalism this fall.

For those who are interested, I’ll share some statistics. This is the 663rd post on PetaPixel, and we’ve received 6,079 comments from our awesome readers so far. We currently have about 5,600+ subscribers through RSS and email, 52,000+ Twitter followers, 3,300+ Facebook fans, and 2,100+ Flickr group members. In the past year we’ve received over 3.4 million pageviews from 1.9 million unique visitors, and are currently serving over 1 million pageviews per month.

Thanks to all of you who read this blog and make things interesting by commenting and connecting with us in various ways.

So much has happened in the past year, and I’m definitely looking forward to all that’s in store for us in year two!

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