FFindr! FFindr the blog! Information about Frisbee events and its Web portal. Find Frisbee anywhere.

FFindr now available in Slovak, the thirteenth translation

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Thanks to Richard Kollar FFindr counts now thirteen (13!) languages, last night the Slovak version went live. Thanks for your work, Richard, joining the following languages:

English since September 2007
German since January 2008
French since February 2008
Spanish since April 2008
Russian since April 2008
Ukrainian since August 2009
Swedish since March 2010
Italian since Mai 2010
Dutch since October 2010
Catalan since November 2010
Polish since Mai 2011
Portuguese since January 2012

Currently there are people working on a Romanian, Japanese and Bulgarian translations. Join them or start working on your language as well, we have an easy-to-use translation interface to assist you.

Find Frisbee anywhere... in Bulgaria

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

These messages make my days, thanks a million to Lubomir Botev! I'm glad that FFindr is helpful, and even more glad that it helps to boost an entire Frisbee community. Read on your own what Lubomir wrote:

"Hello from Bulgaria, FFINDR. I only wanted to thank you, that you exist! FFINDR is one of the main reasons for the existance of ultimate in my country. After founding the 1st club in Bulgaria, me and my friends faced the problem with the lack of expirience, and information about other teams, and competitions.

FFINDR HELPED US TO:

contact 4 very expirienced players from Venezuela and the USA, 2 of which are now the backbone of our team!
we organized a tournament, and 3 teams found it by FFINDR and came to play tith us!
contact more then 10 teams in the Balkans region!

!!! THANK YOU, FFINDR !!! The very best site of Ultimate:)

Lubomir Botev

Lubomir even started to translate FFindr into Bulgarian, maybe this will be the 13th FFindr language (currently Slovakian and Japanese are also racing for this position).

A week-long nightmare thanks to provider issues

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

When I returned from work last Thursday night numerous mails from the Frisbee community were waiting for me (thanks a million Bruno, Bommie, and others), indicating that something is wrong with FFindr!

A quick check revealed that the database connection was broken. I connect to the database: nothing, all data seems to be gone! In search for the emergency service hotline number of provider OVH I stumble upon an automated e-mail sent by OVH on Thursday 19 January 2012 at 16h17:

Your database has been CLOSED due to heavy database queries, exceeding the acceptable time limit! Indeed, the queries (used for the vicinity calculation on FFindr) took a far-above average time to execute. But strangely they performed just fine for almost 3 years.

I call the service hotline in Germany and file an incident ticket straight away, i.e. Thursday at ten to eight PM. Now the Odyssey starts. Naively I believed in a quick solution, all I need is read access or a database dump to restore order on FFindr. The support assures me that the data is safe and that only the access has been taken away. Neither Friday nor Monday (hey, the weekend is for playing Frisbee so I won't bother or blame them for not responding) I regain access to my data, four long days of helpless waiting! By Monday night, again on the phone with the support guys from OVH —who know me by name now— I learn that the ticket still hasn't been treated: It is not priority, your script caused the problem so wait.... What they don't know or understand: with every minute the work of merging all data back becomes more tedious, and by the time I got my access back almost 5 days elapsed (Tuesday 24 January 2012 11h11)!

I won't bother you with the annoying and time-consuming job of merging all changes back into the database (two long nights and everything was fine), I should have logged all database activity but didn't manage to quickly set this up last Thursday. But there's one lesson I learned: never trust your provider! It's not only the incredible response time, but first and foremost the decision to close the database! I made my inquiries and learned that OVH improved the connectivity of the database servers that day, which probably means that they also adapted the rules. Unfortunately my script didn't play following these new, never communicated, rules (by the way, also the old rules are stated nowhere). What about announcing such kind of changes? What about sending out some warnings?

No hard feelings! This nightmare is over after precisely one week, and all I need now is a dedicated server to finally stop playing games with unknown rules.

FFindr now in Portuguese and partner of FPUDD

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Last night the Portuguese version of FFindr went online! The translation of FFindr in its 12th language has been made possible by Patrick van der Valk, godfather of FFindr since its very first months.

This translation is linked to FFindr's recent partnership with the Portuguese Flying Disc Federation (FPUDD), whereof Patrick is also the president. The Federação Portuguesa de Ultimate e Desportos de Disco just opened its membership registration for the new year on FFindr, so if you want to join them you can directly register through FFindr (in your mother tongue, if it is among the twelve supported languages).

Here's a short statement of Patrick regarding the new partnership of FPUDD and FFindr, you very much for your kind words:

"FFindr is a great tool for organizers! I am involved in setting up the Portuguese Flying Disc Federation and using FFindr saves us loads of time. All tournaments, clubs, and members/players can be organized in one space that is accessible for everyone. Now it is available in Portuguese and that is very useful for all players. Thanks Christian. Great work!"

If you want to read FFindr in your language, just get in touch and I will setup the translation interface for you. Currently there are 713 text chains to translate to teach FFindr your language.

Discs for All wants a logo

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

After some years of unofficial existence, the association Discs for All (Disques pour Tous) was officially created at the end of 2011. Now they are looking for an official logo! Rodrigue, who already wrote an article two years back about Frisbee in Africa would like to share the following article with us:

"As you may already know, we try to help developing sports discs (mainly Ultimate) wherever it’s needed. To do this we have collected used or new discs from the Ultimate community and got them to places where they were needed, to people trying to teach Ultimate to kids, mainly in Africa. We also went on the field ourselves to create teams and train local coaches, organise games.

Frisbee at the village of Keleya, Mali

Last year a lot of efforts were put in a project in Mali where there is now an Ultimate league this season with 4-5 local teams, a federation is on its way! We also support NGOs (Right to Play, BØRNEfonden) to develop education programs especially for girls in villages based on sports (and Ultimate).

Frisbee in Rwanda

This year stuff will happen in Namibia, Burkina-Faso, Burundi, Rwanda, Ghana and other countries! A lot of the texts are in French except for some articles in the old Discs for Africa website, but photos speak by themselves, feel free to click on the following links to get a better idea of the smiles you can put on faces with a simple plastic disc:

So yes, back to where we were: we currently can’t say we have a real logo, we kind of need one! But we’re not good at drawing stuff...

So, graphic designers, professional or amateur, help us by letting your imagination speak in order to come up with a logo that will represent the association!

Some basic constraints:

the logo will have to look good and be easy to print in colour as well as in black and white (we're thinking about discs, clothing/kit, paper/posters, the web);
it should be available in two versions, one with the association's name, one without.

Spread the word please and send us your ideas/proposals by February the 15th at discs4all (at) gmail.com ! For more info, do not hesitate to contact us directly at the email address above."

Ultimate Frisbee Tournament 101: Swiss draw Excel template

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Some three years ago I published the article Ultimate Frisbee Tournament 101: Choosing a format . Now, to continue the effort to help tournament directors and organisers with their planning, François Ganneau (TD of Ultimate Delhight 2011) and Siddharth Rajagoplan (planning manager of Ultimate Delhight) share their experience with us. Curtain up!

"FFindr is already a fantastic tool, and the 2.0 aspect makes it appealing for anyone wanting to contribute. A few months back, some of us in Delhi decided to organize the first international tournament in India, the Ultimate Delhi-ght (see the according FFindr Blog article).

We had the idea of implementing the Swiss Draw (SD) format for the first time in Asia. Note: the SD format ensures that teams are ranked quickly according to their real strength and play close matches against opponents of similar strength. Implementing such a schedule was no easy task; the Windmill Windup gang was quick to help and offered us a lot of tips:

a Wikipedia-page with some useful information by Christian Schaffner)
and their initial xls file that was used for their tournament.

They also mentioned that they were developing their own software for it; that’s dedication!

In the same spirit of sharing and making life easier for future tourney organizers, we now bring you the new and improved, latest and greatest version of the Swiss Draw Scheduler that was used for Ultimate Delhight 2011 ;)

We built upon Amsterdam’s great xls and added some useful options (we hope you agree!). This xls is a generic scheduler that we customized to suit the needs of our tournament. The details of how to use this scheduler are given in an info tab.

For the coding freaks out there, or those that like to get in to the thick of things, or even those that want radical customizations to this scheduler, it is primarily created through VBA Script and simple MS-Excel 2007 formulae.

Download DUO Scheduler - vSR6

Feel free to use it or modify it in any way to suit the purposes of your own tournament! Only request – Once you have modified it, please spread the love by sharing your version of the xls too.

Note: after having used it for our tourney, we have a few ideas that we would probably tackle for the next edition. If you feel like, these could be some ideas you could implement for your own tourney, e.g.

Making sure we can compute the next round without having to wait for SOTG results (SOTG could be on different tab for example)
Filling out day 1 schedule tab and day 2 schedule tabs automatically from the results table
Automatically displaying final results (SOTG & ranking), etc.

And if you ask, the first edition of Ultimate Delhi-ght was a great success, with teams from Bahrain and Dubai, along with several Indian teams, and many players from the US, EU and South East Asia.

It was also the first time that the Swiss draw format was used in Asia, and turned out to be a great twist ensuring teams played close games where every point counted towards the final results. All results, including SOTG rankings are published on our website, along with the news coverage related to the tourney.

Hope you all find this useful, and have some fun organizing your own tournaments. We also look forward to seeing many of you at next year's Ultimate Delhi-ght."

Thank you very much for this field report, François and Siddharth! I hope that this "tool" will be helpful for many others and furthermore will evolve over the time. Please don't hesitate to improve it and to further share it with us. The FFindr blog will gladly provide a platform for this.

Cooperation with German DFV — the next step

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Beginning of last year, the German Disc Sports Federation made its partnerhip with FFindr official. The partnership evolved, and now the DFV announces to deepen our cooperation, here's the statement of Jörg Benner — Executive Director of the German Disc Sports Federation (Deutscher Frisbeesport-Verband, DFV):

"Since March 2011, the listing of German Frisbee tournaments on the event calendar of the DFV is directly imported from FFindr, with official events being marked with the DFV logo. Starting with 2012, all team rosters for German Ultimate Frisbee championships will be managed solely via FFindr. This allows for the first time to know for which teams registered members play for a given season.

The DFV is proud to partner with the number 1 Frisbee event portal and appreciates the time-consuming and always solution-driven work of Christian Jennewein for FFindr. The DFV is happy to join the prominent group of official partners such as BULA and the French Flying Disc Federation (FFDF) that are all united by similar goals.

We also plan to include the listing of German Frisbee teams from FFindr. To express our gratitude towards this efficient and free service we integrated the FFindr logo on our homepage. The DFV closely follows the evolution of FFindr since 2007 and also publishes regularly updates about the portal."

Happy New 2012

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Happy New Year everybody! FFindr continued its success story in 2011, with a total of 394,749 visits (+36% compared to 2010) and 1,435,078 pageviews (+57%). Thank you very much to all the people involved with FFindr:

the average user,
providers of new ideas,
translators and translation maintainers,
people who point out bugs and malfunctions,
the partners and sponsors.

Let's try to keep things flying as usual: high!

What happened in 2011:

Partnership with German Frisbee federation DFV
Powering registration of Euro 2011 and Beach Worlds, among many others
FFindr disc design contest
FFindr on JUMP+REACH / Gaia Europe's team jerseys
Polish as FFindr's 11th language
Daily visitor records: 1,795 visits on June 14, 12,259 pageviews on July 20
Monthly visitor records: 40,867 visits in August, 200,847 pageviews in July

What might happen in 2012:

FFindr in Portuguese and Slovak, both are almost ready
The first FFindr Ultimate disc, a discraft 175g
Focus on usability improvements
A new FFindr logo
A new category next to tournaments, teams, players and links
Instant support, as usual
...plenty yet unknown features, as usual

Make the best out of 2012!

WFDF launched new website

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

The World Flying Disc Federation (WFDF) just launched their new and shiny website.

FFindr and WFDF offically work together since January 2010, meaning for two years all events listed are delivered by FFindr. To get listed on WFDF too, just add your event to FFindr and depending on the event calendar's context it'll automatically appear on WFDF.net.

In the right sidebar of the homepage and the WFDF event section you will find the upcoming official WFDF events. Further down you have a list of general upcoming events, all directly retrieved from FFindr.

By the way, every website can actually list FFindr-powered calendars. There are two ways to do so:

creating a custom calendar and use its RSS feed
using the API function events_get

Spread the word about Frisbee, it's happening all the time. All over the globe.

On the FFindr menu for December

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Sigi from Austria just pointed me to his integration of FFindr's API: the website of Austria-based indoor tournament haWEIZ. The API returns all registered teams, which are listed on the right side of the tournament's homepage. Pretty decent integration, well done Sigi!

The following improvements have already be shipped during December, with the version counter now at 4.26:

the Russian Flying Disc Federation (FFDF) joins the numerous other federations already on FFindr (the WFDF, BULA, the French FFDF, the German DFV, the American USAU, the UK Ultimate, the European Ultimate Federation EUF, the Spanish FEDV and the Portuguese FPUDD). This allows for tagging of official events with their logo, and to filter calendars for officially sanctioned tournaments
pushing the privacy settings of player pages even further: depending on their privacy setting, player names are now obfuscated even in roster lists. So if you see a name like Ch••• Je••• just hover over the lock icon to see why you cannot see the full name (either because privacy has been set to for registered users only or to for administrators only)
two new registration answer types: gender (Female, Male) as well as skill type (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced). The latter can serve for questions like How would you rate your technical skills, Your tactical skills, and/or Your athletic skills; allowing you to better anticipate the level of play.

More to come, as usual. Enjoy Christmas time.

Improving the page ownership management

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Finally the page ownership (or administrator) issue has been tackled. Since today, every user on FFindr (you need to be connected) can request ownership of any page. This might happen if you manage a team that has already its page on FFindr, or your player page exists but has been added by someone else. Whatever happened, you can now easily request access to any existing page.

To request ownership of a page, simply connect to your FFindr account and click on the Show options link right below the page title (it doesn't matter whether it's a tournament page or a team, player, link page). You should then click on Request ownership of this page, which triggers:

an e-mail to the current page owner, if there's one. The e-mail includes a link to accept or refuse the request. You will be informed by e-mail in either case. If the current owner ignores your request you won't get any e-mail, in this case please contact me.
an e-mail to you, if the page currently has no owner. You can then make yourself owner of the page by clicking on the confirmation link in the e-mail.

This automation will hopefully solve the numerous requests for changes to page admins (now called owners). In addition there's always me to help and to sort out any administrator or ownership issue that might arise. Just ask me!

FFindr Disc Design contest: The winners

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Alea iacta est, the winners of FFindr's first disc design contest are chosen! Congratulations to

Benjamin Frank, Bordeaux (France)
Victor Katolyk, Lviv (Ukraine)
Marion Jolly, Saint-Jean-de-Monts (France)

for your great designs and the well-deserved rewards. You successfully made it through two voting rounds from our jury! Although only the winning design of Benjamin will be produced on discs, I can proudly say that any of those three designs (and actually many more) would make a great ambassador for FFindr. Thank you so much for having dedicated your time to designing these discs.

The three winning designs

Benjamin will receive 15 discs plus a 25€ shopping voucher from JUMP+REACH / GAIA Europe for his winning design; Victor gets ten discs for becoming the runner-up; and Marion earns five discs for coming in third. Congratulations!!!

Finally I would also like to thank all designers that participated in this first edition:

Alexander Seidel (?)
Benjamin Frank, Bordeaux (France)
David "DP" Pryce, London (United Kingdom)
Davide "Peo" Rossetton, Venice (Italy)
Doreen Becker + Hauke Müller, Berlin (Germany)
Folko Drewes, Bochum (Germany)
Frithjof Fehsenfeld, Bremen (Germany)
Guillaume Toutain-Avy (France)
Humberto "Zumba" Rodrigues, Palmela (Portugal)
Joshua Ringer, London (United Kingdom)
Kaya Dresing, Würzburg (Germany)
Klaus Lengeler, Copenhagen (Denmark)
Loic Dhallenne (France)
Luka Kliewe, Beckum (Germany)
Marion Jolly, Saint-Jean-de-Monts (France)
Mathieu "mute" Quertelet, Clisson (France)
Matteo Ercoli, Prato (Italy)
Matthias, Stuttgart (Stuttgart)
Maureen Walshe (?)
Mauricio Esteves (?)
Michael Laporte, Chevy Chase (United States of America)
Moguís, Los Teques, (Venezuela)
Olivier Cassart, Brussels (Belgium)
Paula Baas, Utrecht (The Netherlands)
Pedro França (?)
Thao Doan-Viêt, Rennes (France)
Tobias Mine, Fano (Italy)
Veronika Nogellova, Bratislava (Slovakia)
Victor Katolyk, Lviv (Ukraine)
Wika Maruszczak, Warsaw (Poland)

Thank you also to FFindr partner JUMP+REACH / GAIA Europe for the additional shopping voucher and for producing and distributing the discs. I can't wait to assist the first Ultimate game with this beautiful FFindr disc!

Ultimate!

Is FFindr fast enough for you?

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0100

I'm currently considering moving FFindr on a dedicated server to drastically improve response time. This would triple the current server costs, so before taking action I would like to know your opinion!

What I'm actually interest in: the perceived time it takes until the page you requested is loaded, rated on a scale from 1 (slow) to 10 (fast). It would also be interesting to know whether you suffered from downtime (pages not available) or issues while using FFindr that are not related to the application itself (only consider blank pages or other errors rather then FFindr-styled error pages).

Please leave a comment and help to better guide my choice. Thanks in advance!

FFindr just got updated to version 4.23

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Last night I pushed FFindr version 4.23 live! It includes a major revamp of the tournament registration form. Initially requested by the guys from Windmill Windup, the new features allow to freely setup questions that have to be answered when submitting a bid/registering for a tournament.

Furthermore, the answers can be configured to require one of the following formats:

any text
a numbers from 0 to 99
either yes, no or maybe
a well-formatted e-mail address
a valid international phone number
a date, to be picked from a little calendar
a country, to be selected from a list of countries
a language, to be selected from a list of languages.

Please note that custom questions cannot be modified once a bid has been submitted (pretty obvious I guess), so are several other fields. In contrary to before, those fields are now greyed out and still visible to you, the tournament admin. This way you can always see the registration's full settings.

In addition, the usability of the registration form has been largely improved. I'm pretty happy to have finished this upgrade, time to move on with other things (e.g. changing the weather API since currently-used weather provider the WeatherChannel now wants to see money). Happy november.

Some 30 people participated in the first disc design contest

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0100

The first ever FFindr Disc Design contest, organised with the kind help and support of JUMP+REACH / GAIA Europe, is over. During the last month a total of 56 different designs have been submitted from 30 designers from all around the world. Thanks for this outstanding participation and your creative designs!

The 56 submitted designs

The next step

The jury,

Charly — a professional designer living and working in Paris
Patrick — coordinates BULA and the WFDF's Spirit of the Game committee
Heiko — JUMP+REACH / GAIA Europe
Christian — the FFindr guy

is now discussing the submitted designs in order to select the winners. The procedure is as follows:

Review of all designs
Each jury member chooses his personal top 3
Review of the remaining designs (12 at most)
Each jury members ranks the remaining designs
The combination of the four rankings determines the winners

The prices

All participants will be mentioned in the article announcing the winners. The three winners will be rewarded discs of the winning design:

15 discs in colours of choice for the winner, an interview on this blog, plus a 25 Euro shopping voucher for the JUMP+REACH / GAIA Europe online shop
10 discs in colours of choice for the runner-up
5 discs in colours of choice for the third place

Thank you very much for your participation and work, can't wait to hold and toss the new FFindr disc!