The first time I saw a “daily photo” site, I didn’t understand that it was part of a worldwide community called CDP (City Daily Photo), but I have seen several since then which have inspired me, and in particular Stuart’s Amboise Daily Photo site. I thought, too, that it would provide the occasion for Jean Michel, who’s also interested in photography, to publish some of his photos.

I especially liked Korean photographer Ahae‘s idea of taking photos all year round from the same window. You obviously need a better camera than an iPhone 4 to do so, but Jean Michel will be able to use his telephoto lens to get some better close-ups, of nature in particular. We have deer in our little wood and in the vacant land between Closerie Falaiseau and the Loire River. We also have lots of different birds and plants.

So I bought the domain name www.bloisdailyphoto.com from Go Daddy, which cost me 21 US dollars for 2 years and while Leonardo, my son and IT expert was here last week, I got him to set up the WordPress site and host it on his server, along with my other websites (Aussie in France, Closerie Falaiseau and my professional website Kneipp Traduction).

Go Daddy also offers hosting and you can have free hosting with WordPress. Stuart uses Blogspot which offers the same services. The only real advantage to having a domain name is that you can choose the extension e.g. .com or .fr or whatever without having blogspot or wordpress in the URL address. It also makes your site independant.

I chose WordPress and not Blogspot simply because I already use it for Aussie in France and Closerie Falaiseau but I don’t think there’s really much difference.

With WordPress (and I assume Blogspot), you get a choice of different formats (templates) which you can change once you’ve set up the site. You’re not restricted to the template you initially downloaded so you can play around with a few and see what you prefer. Once you really get going though, it’s better not to change or you might have to spent time re-organising the layout.

After that, it’s fairly self-explanatory. The section up the top (Aussie in France and the photo on this blog) is called the header. The bits and pieces on the right are called Widgits and can be changed more or less at will (although I had to get Leonardo to tidy up the Facebook, RSS and Tweet buttons for me).

You also have things called plug-ins which can be used to add various functions. Some of them become widgits (LinkWithin, popular post, Loire Valley Accommodation, Sign up for the latest posts) while others remain behind the scenes such as Akismet which protects your blog from comment and trackback spam. You can find and download them easily most of the time. I simply avoid the more complicated ones!

Jean Michel and I will gradually improve the layout, colours, graphics, etc. on Blois Daily Photo, but for the moment, we’re just trying to put up a photo every day. As we’re not in Blois at the moment, we’re drawing on our stock from the last 18 months. We haven’t made any comments on the photos either yet, but that will come. We also thought it would be a good idea to make it bilingual but that requires a little more time and organisation.

So why don’t you come over to Blois Daily Photo and tell us what you think!