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FFindr mashes up with Twitter

Sat, 07 Nov 09 00:00:00 +0100

An exciting upgrade just happened: FFindr now allows for very easy Twitter integration in tournament and link (Team, Club, Blog, Organisation, etc) pages. Twitter? That's a free service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets (read more...)! Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters. They can be send via the Twitter website, SMS or external applications.

Thanks to their briefness, Tweets are ideal for status updates and live scores. Last week's UPA Finals produced tons of Tweets, check the page 2009 UPA Club Championships to see how those Tweets are integrated into FFindr (or check the FFindr page on FFindr that I just linked to Tweets including #frisbee). And from now on, every FFindr page can be directly linked to a stream of recent Tweets.

How does it work? Imagine the page on FFindr as a follower of all Tweets that include a certain keyword. And that keywords (or those, you can actually put in many to filter the search) can easily be set when creating or updating a page. So next time you create a tournament page, just include a word or phrase (let's call it a tag) to search Twitter for... and all Tweets that contain this tag will automatically be included in the page.

You might want to include a maximum of Tweets that tweet about your team or event, so better choose a good word or tag. Good tags are hashtags, which are tags with a # sign in front of it. The hashtag for the tag hashtags would be #hashtags. Hashtags are simply a way of organizing all tweets that relate to one topic or event. Do pick something that is as short as possible, since every character in your tag counts against the 140 character maximum in a tweet.

You could also announce before or at a tournament the hashtag you chose and linked to your FFindr page in order to trigger Tweets that will appear there. This will allow people who couldn't come to follow your event in real-time via Twitter on your FFindr page.

A word of warning: Twitter search only works for a week or two back, so your stream of Tweets will evaporate after a while. So be aware that all those nice and ephemeral Tweets will not stay for very long on the page. For everlasting information just use the result section on every FFindr tournament page. Happy tweeting, happy following!

FFindr + October 2009

Mon, 02 Nov 09 00:00:00 +0100

This weekend was a special one: UPA and UltiVillage provided the world with a three-day live stream from the UPA Nationals in Sarasota, Florida. The webcast featured great quality and competent commentators (although less funny than Steve and Tom from BlockStack.TV), and only went down occasionally. A great experience, and all that was missing were replays. Let's hope to have them next year. All the twittering and tweeting during the UPA Finals lead to a twitter account for FFindr, and some tests regarding the integration of real-time tweets into tournament and link pages.

Now to the monthly stats review. Popularity of FFindr grew once more last month, slightly topping the all-time highs set in September: 18,487 Visits (+1.3%) and 51,909 Pageviews (+3.4%) from different 128 countries (+8 compared to September). Looks like the time of double-digit percentage growth are over, the goal should be to keep this level and to continue to grow steadily — especially with the less exciting winter coming up.

Alexa's three-months-average ranking lists FFindr on position 818,301, with a 7 day average of position 445,685, and a 1 month average of 658,833. Especially the rankings for France (position 54,981) and Germany (192,091) feel good. But as I already said, those statistics should be handled with care.

Taking a look at the visits by country shows the US taking home a big piece of the cake with more than 28 percent, and with the UK climbing on second position. Colombia and Belgium replaced Switzerland and Poland from some less prominent places.

United States 28.11% ↱ (1. with 19.85% in September 2009)
United Kingdom 12.23% ↱ (3. with 12.03%)
Germany 11.35% ↳ (2. with 19.43%)
France 9.16% ↳ (4. with 9.91%)
Canada 4.68% ↱ (5. with 3.46%)
Spain 2.62% ↳ (6. with 3.30%)
Italy 2.22% ↳ (7. with 2.88%)
Colombia 2.17% ↱ (15. with 1.19%)
Belgium 2.10% ↱ (11. with 1.74%)
Austria 2.02% ↔ (9. with 2.02%)

Quite some turbulences in the top ten by cities. Many cities significantly lost shares, it seems like a ruralization took place. Bogotá and New York are back in the list, with London keeping its top position ahead of Paris and Berlin.

London 4.02% ↳ (1. with 4.72% in September 2009)
Paris 3.46% ↔ (3. with 3.45%%)
Berlin 1.34% ↳ (2. with 4.51%)
Vienna 1.28% ↱ (4. with 1.17%)
Moscow 1.12% ↱ (9. with 0.84%)
Bogotá 1.11% ↱ (17. with 0.65%)
New York 0.88% ↔ (12. with 0.79%)
Dublin 0.84% ↳ (6. with 0.97%)
Munich 0.84% ↔ (9. with 0.85%)
Zurich 0.77% ↳ (5. with 1.05%)

As usual the top ten tournaments on FFindr:

World Ultimate Club Championships 2010 (528 views in October)
Novembernebel 09 (439)
Iron Five 2009 (411)
2009 Canadian University Ultimate Championships (333)
Purple Valley 2009 (230)
No Wisconsequences 2009 (227)
Glory Days 2009 (225)
Wolfpack Invitational 2009 (221)
eXtended European Ultimate Championship Final 2009 (219)
Bologna Is Back! (211)

If this weren't enough statistics for you, have a look at what Google Insight says about Frisbee. I nice tool to check the global interest in Frisbee. The data is based on how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. Looks like popularity for Frisbee is declining, but I'll put it this way: Frisbee people are early adopters and embraced the Internet in no-time, thus the proportional slowdown.

FFindr now supports custom tournament lists

Tue, 27 Oct 09 00:00:00 +0100

I proudly announce the launch of custom tournament lists on FFindr! The idea for these team tournament lists comes from Fresh, who asked for an easy-to-create team calendar.

Once logged into FFindr, everybody can now easily create personal event lists and add whatever tournament to it. Imagine tournament lists like

tournaments I played in 2009,
GrandMaster Flash tournaments, or
Disctèrics Ultimate tourneys 2010.

All lists certainly come with an RSS feed—allowing for easy syndication/integration in websites—and the possibility to get exported to iCalendar—allowing for calendar synchronisation with your Google Calendar, iPhone, Outlook or any other decent time management software.

To start adding events to custom tournament lists, just browse to a tournament page on FFindr and click "Add to custom tournament list" within the "Show options" menu below the event title. Usage (list creation, adding and removing of tourneys) should be straight forward, if not please complain.

A decent amount of other changes has been shipped with this release. There is for instance the extensive use of progressive disclosure to fight visual noise that ever growing functionality brings with it. All actions (such as Export to Google Calendar, Edit event, or Add to tournament list) are now grouped and hidden, and only show upon a click on Show options. So please be curios when using FFindr, not all of its functionalities are now visible at first sight.

Also the visual footprint of the information in the sidebars has been slightly diminished. Finally, on request from Victor, event logos can now be added to tournament pages.

That's all for the moment, got to rest now.

Organising work on FFindr: much ta-da about to-do

Wed, 21 Oct 09 00:00:00 +0200

Lately I'm spending—once again— a lot of time on FFindr. The results will shortly go live, consisting of a general clean-up of the website plus the feature to save tournaments to a custom list.

Next to the constant evolution of the website itself, also organisational aspects of FFindr step up. Since beginning of October all time efforts for the project are time-tracked by Paymo.biz, resulting in nice graphics and a valuable overview of how much time goes into FFindr.

Another service that FFindr recently adopted are the Ta-Da Lists of 37signals, allowing for easy to-do list management. Now new tasks can be added any time and from anywhere, and everybody can have a look at what currently has to be done on FFindr!

There are three different lists that reflect the things to do ...

FFindr! To be done — New features where either implementation is in progress or implementation is imminent.
FFindr! Nice to have — Ideas of new features that might get implemented in the near future.
FFindr! Bugs — Problems, malfunctions, bugs that need to be taken care of as soon as possible.

...go ahead and have a look at them. Soon they will be integrated on the contact/feedback page to give more insights into the current state of development and road-mapping of FFindr.

FFindr explained: creating a personalised Frisbee calendar

Fri, 16 Oct 09 00:00:00 +0200

Today I want to talk about (and thus re-introduce) a core feature on FFindr: the creation of perfectly tailored Frisbee tournament calendars. This functionality was part of the initial ideas that lead to FFindr. I actually thought that it will attract much more buzz, but it turned out that people prefer ready-made country- or continent-wide calendars rather than creating their own personalised one—239 have been created so far (that's a little more than 10 per month).

Anyway, the feature exists and lost nothing of its charm. Read on if you like to get a Frisbee calendar that shows only events you are interested in.

Custom calendars can be created in the tournament section, check out the filter options in the right sidebar. You can heavily narrow down the number of displayed tournaments simply by setting filters by

location, either based on
- distance, e.g. 500 kilometres around Warsaw
- the countries you select, e.g. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland
- the continents you select, e.g. Asia and Oceania
discipline (select Ultimate Frisbee, Disc golf, Freestyle, Guts, DDC, Goaltimate or Others)
format (for instance if you wish to see only Hat tournaments or International championships)
surface (e.g. Grass, Indoor, Beach)
division (select among 15 different divisions such as Open, Women, College, ...)
level of play (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, All levels)

To get a custom calendar simply tick your options of choice and click apply. You now successfully reduced the huge amount of tournaments listed on FFindr to events relevant only to you.

Finally, to avoid checking and applying the filter options each time you visit FFindr, you can simply save your custom calendar. Just log into your free FFindr account and click on save current calendar below the filter options. You then have a permanent calendar just for you, including an RSS feed allowing for automatic notifications of newly added tournaments that pass your filter (check out the manage your saved filters option to further fine-tune your saved filters, choosing for instance to remove all past events or setting the calendar year).

Here's a quick selection of existing custom calendars to inspire you:

Got it? Then go ahead and create custom calendars and never ever miss anything related to Frisbee in your area.

FFindr explained: styling content with the text editor

Sun, 11 Oct 09 00:00:00 +0200

FFindr is evolving for two years now. New features get integrated, the complexity grows. This series is meant to put some hidden features in perspective. I will start with the content of tournament and link pages. Content is king, and next to the Frisbee calendars—i.e. the precise tournaments dates—definitely the second most sought information on FFindr.

Reading just plain text is boring and takes much longer than nicely formatted and styled information.

A bunch of styles can directly be inserted via the text editor button bar that appears above text fields when adding or editing tournament or link pages. The next paragraphs show which functionality is available and behind which button it hides.

This is a top level headline (1)

This is a second level headline (2)

3 makes text bold, 4 puts text into italic and

5 sets text in monospace and inside a box.

(attention: the text has to start in a new line in order to make the monospaced box work)

Lists can easily be presented unordered (6)...

just
provide
some

...and ordered (7)

list
items.

8 lets you quote text in a simple way,

just like this!

9 guides you through the inclusion of images, just provide an alternative text and the URL to an image to make it appear on the page (like this one from Bommie found on beachultimate.org).

10 allows for easy link creation, just provide your URL and Your text to link there....

Finally there is the preview button (11), allowing for a quick check whether the applied styles give the expected results. Happy styling.

Traffic for September hit an all-time high

Thu, 01 Oct 09 00:00:00 +0200

The site's usage increased sharply during the last month, reaching new highs with 18,256 Visits (up 25 percent vs. August, the previously best visited month) from 120 countries requesting 50,195 Pageviews (up 20 percent vs. August and +13% compared to March 2009, the previous top result). So finally the 50k Pageviews barrier fell, the next targets: 25k Visitors for the near future and 100k Pageviews in the medium term!

The US back on the top of the visits by country ranking, with UK on third position pushing France aside. Poland is back in the top ten after quite a while, definitely linked to work in progress on a Polish translation.

United States 19.85% ↱ (2. with 18.51% in August 2009)
Germany 19.43% ↳ (1. with 20.14%)
United Kingdom 12.03% ↱ (4. with 9.90%)
France 9.91% ↳ (3. with 10.41%)
Canada 3.46% ↳ (5. with 6.34%)
Spain 3.30% ↱ (11. with 1.81%)
Italy 2.88% ↱ (9. with 2.07%)
Switzerland 2.64% ↱ (7. with 2.54%)
Austria 2.02% ↳ (6. with 2.68%)
Poland 1.81% ↱ (15. with 1.15%)

Some turbulences in the visits by cities chart: this year's EUCF capital London coming first, long-time leader Paris dropping yet another position down to third, and Warsaw, Moscow and Madrid pushing in the top ten from far behind.

London 4.72% ↱ (3. with 3.79% in August 2009)
Berlin 4.51% ↳ (1. with 4.39%)
Paris 3.45% ↳ (2. with 4.07%)
Vienna 1.17% ↳ (4. with 1.75%)
Zurich 1.05% ↔ (7. with 1.07%)
Dublin 0.97% ↳ (5. with 1.36%)
Warsaw 0.89% ↱ (29. with 0.50%)
Munich 0.85% ↳ (6. with 1.15%)
Moscow 0.84% ↱ (36. with 0.44%)
Madrid 0.82% ↱ (39. with 0.42%)

The Ultimate European Club event, the XEUCF in London, has been the most visited tournament in September, followed by events that take advantage of FFindr's free online registration.

eXtended European Ultimate Championship Final 2009 (1,104 views)
Drachenfest 2009 (1,098)
Iron Five 2009 (559)
Mixed-DM 2009 (509)
Oktoberfest-Tourney 2009 (419)
Novembernebel 09 (416)
Burla Beach Cup 2009 - Smurf Pride (414)
1st Frontier Runner HAT (Grenzgänger HAT) (400)
World Ultimate Club Championships 2010 (310)
Herbstliga Berlin-Potsdam (297)

Enjoy the golden October, which will bring many more improvements to FFindr (heavily cleaned up tournament and link pages, a Polish translation, and a freely configurable team calendar to name only a few).

2 years FFindr

Thu, 17 Sep 09 00:00:00 +0200

Happy birthday, Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Joyeux anniversaire, Feliz cumpleaños, С Днем Рождения, З Днем Народження FFindr! Two years ago this online platform for Frisbee tournaments went live, thanks to all of you for collaborating, visiting and pushing the platform to where and what it is today. The motivation was to create a truly simple Frisbee management tool that works 24/7 and around the world. Two years later, the website's goal broadened a little: while continuing to spread the word about its usefulness and increase its usage world wide, FFindr also aims to become an essential online tool for tournament organisers. In the future I'd like to see many tournament related tasks such as invitation (already available), registration (already available), team selection and invitation (already available), seeding, scheduling, score reporting, and archiving solved by FFindr.

Visits (0-20,000) and Pageviews (0-50,000) for the first 2 years

During FFindr's lifespan of now 24 months, the website attracted an impressive 154,032 Visits and a total of 506,060 Pageviews from 173 countries. The numbers of visits (+355% compared to the first year) and page views (+283.13%) skyrocked during its second year, on average FFindr served 1,100 pages to 346 visitors a day.

Map of visits by country (the greener the more) during the first 2 years

Looking at how people found their way to FFindr, the second year showed a heavily decreased amount of direct traffic (-43.04%): 12.95% (compared to 22.73%). The same is true for traffic coming in from referring sites (-49.51%), which accounts for 20.88% (compared to 41.36%) of FFindr's traffic during the second year. By far most of the visitors come via search engines, which are responsible for 66.09% (was 35.82%) of the visitors (a +84.49% increase compared to FFindr's first year).

In the following some information regarding FFindr data, as opposed to the monthly statistics review that concentrate on visitors. FFindr lists a total of 1733 tournaments in 63 different countries (events) and 706 links from 74 different countries. The United States (343), Germany (280), and France (257) are clearly the nations with most of the tournaments listed. United Kingdom (181) on fourth place with Canada (56) far behind on fifth. Regarding links per country, United States (97) is again leading, with Germany (88), United Kingdom (65) and France (62) behind.

Some more numbers: almost 800 users created a free FFindr account, 377 of them contributed at least one event or link. 273 comments have been made, 290 tournament registration bids have been submitted, and 441 tournaments or links have been marked as favourites by FFindr users.

The challenging goal announced on last year's birthday proved to be too ambitious (27,603 visits and 104,381 page views per month), but seems to be realistic enough to be achieved for the third anniversary. In the meanwhile I keep on working to make this website an ever better service. The next feature will enable FFindr users to create their custom team tournament calendar, only containing the tourneys they want to add — i.e. the ones they might want to attend. The idea for this feature comes from you, as many others! Keep on sending suggestions and I am sure that FFindr will not stop to evolve in the right direction.

FFindr just got upgraded

Tue, 15 Sep 09 00:00:00 +0200

Two month after the last upgrade, FFindr just received a bunch of new functionalities.

The hottest feature is doubtlessly the option to export any calendar on FFindr (saved customised calendars included) in the standard iCalendar format. iCal is a widely used calendar format, supported by applications such as Apple iCal, Facebook, Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, and many more.

At the same time a number of smaller corrections and improvements went online, such as

a new markup text editor that allows you to better control the layout of the description text on your tournament and link pages,
a live search suggest while typing in the search box on the upper right of this page, just start typing and FFindr auto-completes your query with available results,
your favourite tournaments and links are now marked with a sweet little heart in all calendars (including the custom filtered ones), the link lists as well as in search results,
a new Frisbee discipline has been added: "Guts" joins "Ultimate Frisbee", "Disc golf", "Freestyle", "Double Disc Court", "Goaltimate" and "Others" as seventh discipline,
an eye-catching pink badge has been added to the tournament calendars in order to encourage people to share/add their tournaments, and finally
another eye-catching pink star has been introduced, pointing at new and especially powerful features.

The latter new star currently highlights the registration feature on tournament websites, hopefully leading to a better visibility of this massive time-saver for Frisbee tournament directors. Enjoy and keep your ideas and suggestions coming.

The history of European Ultimate Club Championships

Fri, 04 Sep 09 00:00:00 +0200

In three weeks the eXtended European Ultimate Championships will take place in London. And with it comes yet another beautiful acronym: XEUCF. One year ago I wrote a post about the European Ultimate Championships Series, definitely worth a look for a better understand of how we got here and what all these acronyms really mean.

After some extensive researching I dug up some interesting information about the history of European Ultimate Club Championships (EUCC), the event that determines the best Ultimate Frisbee Club in Europe. The first EUCC took place in 1992 in Rotenburg, Germany, with SFMSC (Sweden) winning the open division and Red Lights (Netherlands) women's division. At the time, the governing body of European Frisbee activities, EFDF, organised each year a major international event: one year a championships for national teams (EUC) and the next the EUCC. In 1994 the second EUCC took place in Eching near Munich, KFUM Örebro (Sweden) took the title in the open division whereas Red Lights from Amsterdam won the women's division.

In 1996, the year when the third EUCC should have happened, EFDF only found a potential host very late. The resulting late invitation plus the fact that players just had too many tournament commitments finally caused the cancellation of the 1996 EUCC. At the time the World Flying Disc Federation (WFDF) organised World Championships each year. 1997 saw the World Ultimate Championships for Clubs in Vancouver, 1998 the Worlds for National Teams in Blaine, Minnesota, USA. All these events proved to be too much for the existing players base, thus the 1998 EUCC never happened.

The 1999 World Club Championships in St. Andrews, Scotland, and the 2000 World Championships for National Teams in Heilbronn were the last held in the two-year cycle, allowing players and EFDF to re-establish the EUCC in the international Ultimate tournament calendar.

Seven years after the second EUCC followed the third: Prague attracted 55 teams in four divisions (Open, Women, Mixed and Juniors) for its EFDF European Ultimate Club Championships 2001. Skogshyddans from Sweden took the Open title, Bliss (United Kingdom) imposed themselves in the Women's division, Stenungsunds FC (Sweden) won the Mixed division and Sweden came first in the Juniors division. Daily newsletter Dailydisquito provides some beautiful and detailed souvenirs from Prague 2001: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Finalists / Interviews
Results & Rankings.

The last big European Club Championships took place in Rostock, Germany, in the summer of 2005. The championships was won by Clapham (United Kingdom) in the Open division, JinX (Germany) in Women's, Friselis (France) in Mixed and Red Lights in the Masters division. One year later the EUCS started for Open and Women club teams, crowning a European Ultimate champion once a year.

To keep the four-year cycle for a major European Ultimate tournament with several divisions alive, XEUCF has been conceived to determine EUCC 2005 successors in the Mixed and Masters divisions. Chances are good that three-time champion Skogshyddan (2001, 2006, 2008) or two-time champion Clapham (2005, 2007) will add yet another European Ultimate Club Championships title to their collection. See you in London!

What FFindr's visitors were up to in August

Wed, 02 Sep 09 00:00:00 +0200

The visitor statistics showed fully recovered from their little summer dip by setting a new all-time high for unique visitors: 14,655 visits from 122 countries browsed FFindr in August (the old record dated from April 2009 with 13,980 visits)! Although the 41,634 page views are not a record (March 2009 triggered 44,152 page views), there is a clear upward trend compared to June (34,331) and July (36,149). Compared to one year ago, the number of visitors augmented by 258%, page views by 294%.

A steady as usual country top ten, except that we have a new leader: Germany took first place from USA, definitely due to the early adoption of the new online registration for Frisbee tournaments.

Germany 20.14% ↱ (2. with a share of 15.56% in May 2009)
United States 18.51% ↳ (1. with 23.88%)
France 10.41% ↳ (3. with 11.96%)
United Kingdom 9.90% ↱ (4. with 8.66%)
Canada 6.34% ↱ (5. with 6.22%)
Austria 2.68% ↔ (7. with 2.60% / +504.62%)
Switzerland 2.54% ↳ (6. with 3.06% / +108.99%)
Belgium 2.20% ↔ (10. with 2.24%)
Italy 2.07% ↳ (9. with 2.26%)
Netherlands 1.95% ↱ (12. with 1.57%)

The city top ten got mixed around quite a bit, although no newcomers could enter this time. Berlin overtakes Paris, the latter being always on the top right from the beginning.

Berlin 4.39% ↱ (3. with 1.85% in July 2009)
Paris 4.07% ↳ (1. with 5.14%)
London 3.79% ↱ (2. with 3.40%)
Vienna 1.75% ↱ (4. with 1.57%)
Dublin 1.36% ↱ (7. with 1.02%)
Munich 1.15% ↱ (8. with 0.90%)
Zurich 1.07% ↔ (6. with 1.16%)
Bogota 0.97% ↱ (9. with 0.85%)
New York 0.94% ↳ (5. with 1.34%)
Stuttgart 0.87% ↳ (10. with 0.72%)

Every now and then I also look at the distribution regarding continents. In the last six months South America overtook Asia taking the third place, all the rest is more or less steady.

Europe 65.41% (compared to 66% in January 2009)
North America 24.85% (25%)
South America 4.05% (2.96%)
Asia 3.92% (3.12%)
Oceania 1.13% (1.87%)
Africa 0.63% (0.68%)

The most visited tournaments are coined by those using the new online registration powered by FFindr as well as the top level summer tourneys in Europe (EYUC 2009, DM 2009 and EUCR 2009 CE) and Northern America (CUC 2009 and ECC 2009).

Drachenfest 2009 (549 views)
EFDF European Youth Ultimate Championships 2009 (530)
Herbstliga Berlin-Potsdam (509)
Deutsche Ultimate Meisterschaften 2009 (470)
1st Frontier Runner HAT (Grenzgänger HAT) (441)
Paris Summerlove 2009 (411)
Oktoberfest-Tourney 2009 (351)
Emerald City Classic 2009 (315)
Canadian Ultimate Championships 2009 (272)
2009 EUCS Regionals Central East (245)

I played a little with Google, the search engine that sends by far most of the visitors to FFindr. In general it is noticeable that Google considers content on FFindr particularly relevant (the homepage currently has a Pagerank of 6, the blog has one of 5), most searches for tournaments show a link to the tournament's page on FFindr among the top results.

Searching for frisbee reveals FFindr on the third page of results (position 34). Much better results achieve the terms frisbee tournament, showing FFindr on 5th place! A Google search for frisbee organiser or frisbee event returns FFindr.com on the top position, whereas frisbee tourney, frisbee tournament manager and frisbee tournament registration show FFindr on the bottom of the first results page (position 9).

FFindr now available in Ukrainian

Thu, 27 Aug 09 00:00:00 +0200

Thanks to the great work of Victor from Lviv (Ukraine), FFindr is from now on available in Ukrainian (українська). The whole translation process took about one week -- from the first contact by e-mail to the deployment on FFindr. Good work, Victor!

In return he uses FFindr for managing the local Western Ukrainian Ultimate League, which includes teams from Lviv, Lutsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kolomyya, and Rivne. The fully automated registration process convinced Victor to use FFindr as his league management tool of choice, making his life as a Frisbee organiser much simpler thanks to the automated bid notification e-mails and the ever up-to-date Excel file including all submitted bids.

In total, FFindr features now the six following languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Russian and Ukrainian. These cover the languages of the top 15 countries that are at the origin of FFindr's visitors -- except for Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. Are you from one of these countries and interested in having FFindr in your language? Feel free to get in touch in order to receive some instructions regarding how to get the translation done. It is a pretty straightforward task that can be accomplished by anybody who is fluent in English.

A close look at July's visitor stats

Wed, 12 Aug 09 00:00:00 +0200

Back from a great Hat tourney on the beach in Ukraine, a must-play for every Frisbee traveller! One of the most beautiful Frisbee tournament locations one can imagine; 250 players mainly from Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia; intense and high level Ultimate; professional DJs mixing 48 hours non-stop; and all this only 3 stops by metro plus a short row-boat ride from Kiev's main square. Be there in 2010!

Back to life, back to reality. It's time for yet another look at the usage of this site. This month the data is (almost, actually the first week of July is still affected) reliable, remember that a flawed script caused troubles and thus reduced the counted visitors dramatically.

In July 2009, ffindr delivered more than 36,149 pages to over 13,160 visitors from 124 countries. In average people browsed 2.75 pages in 1 minute and 51 seconds.

The top ten seems to be carved in stone, only Austria moved up three places to position seven.

United States 23.88% ↳ (1. with 22.46% in May)
Germany 15.56% ↱ (2. with 14.36%)
France 11.96% ↱ (3. with 10.30%)
United Kingdom 8.66% ↳ (4. with 8.83%)
Canada 6.22% ↳ (5. with 6.48%)
Switzerland 3.06% ↳ (6. with 4.00%)
Austria 2.60% ↱ (10. with 2.18%)
Spain 2.57% ↳ (7. with 3.08%)
Italy 2.26% ↳ (9. with 2.43%)
Belgium 2.24% ↳ (8. with 3.08%)

A little more movement in the top ten for visits by city. Paris strong as usual, whereas long-time third Dublin slipped down to seventh place. Welcome to Bogota and Stuttgart, that now pushed into the top ten.

Paris 5.14% ↱ (1. with 3.80% in May)
London 3.40% ↳ (2. with 3.53%)
Berlin 1.85% ↱ (5. with 1.58%)
Vienna 1.57% ↱ (6. with 1.36%)
New York 1.34% ↔ (7. with 1.26%)
Zurich 1.16% ↳ (4. with 1.68%)
Dublin 1.02% ↳ (3. with 1.85%)
Munich 0.90% ↔ (8. with 0.87%)
Bogota 0.85% ↔ (11. with 0.77%)
Stuttgart 0.72% ↔ (12. with 0.75%)

To conclude this statistics review, here's a look at the top ten visited tournaments on ffindr during July:

Paris Summerlove 2009 (577 views)
World Games 2009 (400)
1st Frontier Runner HAT (Grenzgänger HAT) (275)
Oktoberfest-Tourney 2009 (222)
Eight Nations Championship (204)
Motown Throwdown 2009 (201)
Sun Of The Beach 2009 (185)
Wild Wedding 2009 (164)
PIG ME UP (158)
Pink Mix (158)

Last note for today: ffindr's page on Facebook is close to having 250 friends. The spread the word page features 30 of them, become a friend to be part of them!

Featured tournament: Kiev Hat

Tue, 21 Jul 09 00:00:00 +0200

Time for another ffindr featured tournament, this time the choice fell on a sexy Beach Ultimate tournament in an exotic place: the Kyiv Hat in Ukraine. Patrick from BULA beat me to the draw by revealing this gem to a wider public. No problem, the following in-depth interview with tournament director Dmitry Strelchin will reveal even more information about this down-town event played on Dovbychka beach on Trukhaniv Island in the Dnieper river. Kiev is the third capital I know of that brings Beach Ultimate Frisbee right into the city, next to Berlin and Brussels.

1. When did the tournament start and how did it evolve?

In 2003, Sergey Bondarenko paved the way for Ultimate Frisbee tournaments in Kiev with a little tournament of 30 people from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

Having experienced some Frisbee tournaments abroad plus the availability of a new beach venue in down-town Kiev (actually it's a nudist beach -- check this not-photoshopped picture!), Kiev saw a second Frisbee tournament with 80 people in 2005. The following year organisers took the newly baptised Kiev Hat to the next level, which resulted in a doubling of participation! In 2007 the tourney became an official BULA event plus a website where the team draw was transmitted live. 200+ players showed up for last year's themed "Don’t worry, Be Happy!" edition. 3 full-sized BULA fields and even more important: everything one can imagine for a real fun event! An open air beach party, great music, free hookahs and fireworks literally made everybody happy.

2. What is the biggest hurdle to take during the organisation of the event?

There are some time constraints since everybody involved in organisation has a job, and combining work commitments with organisational efforts is not that easy. But we are lucky to have bunch of motivated people from the local teams Gigolo & Dyki Krali that take care of the Kiev Hat. At the end everything goes well and the entertainment the participants receive makes up for all the sleepless nights and brainstorms for creativity.

3. Kiev Hat features two divisions, how come and how does it work?

We noticed that rookies tend to play less in important games, and thus we created a division for them two years ago. We have now an advanced division for stronger players, where everybody knows the rules and is able to keep the disc flowing. And we have the rookie division that offers everybody plenty of playing time and thus allows for quicker development.

We get nice media coverage for the Hat tournament, newspapers and TV report about this new sport thus attracting a bunch of new players. Together with the confirmed players from other Ukrainian cities plus strong players from Russia, this leads to a good mix that is also a perfect promotion for Frisbee.

4. Where do you see the Kiev Hat in 2015?

I would like to hold the tournament at the same place because this beach is a really beautiful place. I just hope we will be able to accept everybody who wants to play in 2015.

We received 100 bids the day we opened the registration, and after one week the 240 spots were filled. It is risky for us to promise more than 240 people to play, so we prepare only 240 players packs. People on the waiting list are guaranteed to play, although they only get a players pack if somebody withdraws (entry fee will be reduced if no players pack can be attributed).

I think Kiev Hat 2009 reached its limit in terms of players quantity. In addition there is no need to make it bigger, it is a Hat tournament with only three fields -- and more players might actually reduce the quality of the tournament. Kiev has a really fun-loving Frisbee community and we are proud of the atmosphere that they create during Kiev Hat.

That's it, thanks a lot to Dmitry for giving an insight into Kiev Hat. In case you haven't had a look at the previous featured tournaments on ffindr...

Tom's Tourney (Brugge, Belgium)
Boracay Open (Boracay, Philippines)
Lei-Out (Los Angeles, USA)
Disco Volador 2006 (Bogota, Colombia)
Coman Fruta Cabrónes (Tenerife, Spain)
UPA Championships (Sarasota, USA)
European Ultimate Championships Finals (Paris, France)
Monkey Foo Tournament (Bourg d'Oisans, France)

See you on the beach in Kiev, apparently my team will be disguised as Scots with kilt and beret... hard to miss.

Enriched Frisbee world map on homepage

Sat, 11 Jul 09 00:00:00 +0200

Work on the implementation of a new clustering technique for the map on ffindr's welcome page carried a little to excess, in a positive sense. The map features now all upcoming tournaments (in blue) plus all links (in yellow). The latter, until now, never made it on the map. The result of this probably biggest Frisbee geo mapping shows nicely the geographical distribution of Frisbee.

Tournaments and ultilinks are grouped together at higher zoom levels (i.e. from far away) into a bigger marker stating the number of included points. The more one zooms into the map the more details get revealed. In addition to the new ultilinks data, the display (rendering) of the markers has been heavily accelerated.

More data, but faster, and a lot easier to access! A true enhancements of the user experience. A nice little extra feature gets revealed when clicking on the button in the top right corner of the map: the map expands to more than twice its size! Enjoy browsing the new world map.