It's almost a year since I moved my Photocritic blog over here to Pixiq. I'll be honest with you; it was a tense time. Was I selling out my readers? Would people react well or would they hate it? Would they run away by the droves, or would I collect a nice amount of new readers, and benefit from the cross-promotion with other talented photography writers?

I was worried about giving up control. I was worried about not being able to do the coding myself. I was worried about not being able to implement my own code on the blog. It turns out I was worrying about absolutely nothing. Sure, there are toys I wish I could have, and there are occasional bugs on Pixiq that I think ought to have been fixed quicker (I'm particularly looking at the video player that doesn't work in all browsers - but apparently that is getting fixed soon)...

But ultimately, handing over the keys to the technical side of the blog means that I don't have to worry about caching layers, bandwidth costs, or server tweaking. Being able to ignore all that and concentrate on what I do best - Writing and ranting about photography - has been liberating.

And I believe it shows: the month of September has shown me, more than any other month, that I've made the right decision. My posts alone here on Pixiq attracted a quarter of a million page impressions - yes, that's nearly 250,000 page impressions, just for me. Pixiq as a whole, obviously, got a whole load of extra traffic too.

The top 20 articles in September:

In other words, these are the ones that have been most read... And if you haven't seen one or more of them yet, perhaps you'll find a gem or two here!

Photo Credit: "Dance" on Flickr (cc) by Nuno Duarte.

It’s raining here in London and it’s making me feel a little bit down. In an attempt to make my world seem a little less bleary, I thought I’d go looking for travel photos. Whether or not this has actually cheered me up, or just made me want to fling a random selection of clothes in a bag and grab my passport, I’ve not quite decided. But here are some of the best travel photography sites that I wandered onto on my world trip, conducted from the comfort of the Small Aperture mansion.

My favourite has to be Photoburst. It’s a daily travel photo competition. One photo from however many daily submissions is selected and exhibited. You can check back at retrospective winners and explore the globe, but when you land on the home page you’re confronted with one, large, beautiful image.

Travelblog shows 30 thirty different photos every ten minutes. Some of them might not be that terrific, but the variety means that you’ll probably stumble over something that really appeals or inspires. And if you don’t, check back in ten minutes’ time!

I spent far too long just clicking through the gallery at Travellerspoint. The initial interface doesn’t do much to showcase pictures, but once you’re into the gallery-proper, you’ll be absorbed as you fly from Ireland to Bolivia to Nepal, via the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Of course, National Geographic has an awesome collection of pictures. You can browse by country or by theme, or there’s the photograph of the day.

And finally there’s TrekEarth. There’s so much to choose from that just for browsing you might be overwhelmed—TrekEarth is a travel photo community that aims to improve photographers’ work through constructive criticism—but do go and look at the travelogues, where members submit a series of pictures to tell the story of a trip.

It’s still raining here. Ah well. Do you have any particular favourites to share?

September 2011: A record month for me.

The top 20 articles in September:

Armchair travel