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

Ultimate going strong in Colombia

Thu, 19 Nov 09 00:00:00 +0100

This week the Torneo Eterna Primavera happens in Medellin, Colombia. The Eternal Spring Tournament or TEP is a professionally organised, high-level invitational Ultimate Frisbee tournament uniting teams from all over the Americas: the Open division will see Furious George (Canada), Sockeye (USA), Caobos (Venezuela), Kie (Colombia), Domino (Dominican Republic), and Ultimate Argentina to name just a few. The women's division features Riot (USA), Traffic (Canada), Aerosul (Colombia), Voladoras (Venezuela) among many others.

A pretty impressive starter field, with both the Open and Women reigning World Champions. Ultimate Frisbee is growing fast in Colombia. The 2008 Worlds in Vancouver showed this, and this unprecedented event clearly underlines Colombia's ambitions to become a first-class Ultimate nation (by the way, the Colombian city Cali is the host of the next World Games in 2013, which will also feature Ultimate Frisbee as a medal sport).

Frisbee-related lectures, discussions and skill clinics throughout the week will accumulate in a three day top-notch Ultimate tournament from November 25th to 28th. Accompanied by great promotional videos and numerous sponsors, these efforts will surely bear fruit and foster the growth of Frisbee in Colombia. To be applied to other nations too!

Interesting interview about FFindr with IFDA

Thu, 12 Nov 09 00:00:00 +0100

Mark Earley, editor of the IFDA Newsletter, recently interviewed me for the newsletter of the Irish Flying Disc Association. Over the past couple of years the IFDA has produced this Newsletter, mainly focused on events in Irish Ultimate, but with some bits from overseas also.

Inside the interview labelled "FFound! : The story of FFindr.com" are loads of first-hand information that nobody ever asked before. Have a look at the brimful November 2009 issue to read about FFindr's origin, current state and future among other great Frisbee stories.

Hi Christian, thanks for taking time out to talk to me. So, recently FFindr celebrated it's birthday. Two years already! It seems like it had been around for a longer time. What made you start the site?

Since the very beginning a fair part of FFindr's users come from Ireland, so I happily take my time to give back the Irishs' confidence. Yeah, the start in 2007 really is a long time ago, especially in the fast life of the Internet. Look at Facebook who started in 2004, and getting really popular around 2006. Initial thoughts about a global Frisbee tournament website started in 2007, triggered by many different factors:

Above all the downfall of excellent Ultilinks.com in 2006,
The new power of the mass-Web 2.0 (user generated content),
The need of a useful tournament tool since I played more and more Ultimate,
A specification analysis I wrote for a WFDF website task force that never caught on,
The technical know-how to build big websites by myself,
The motivation to devote time to a big project that would create some impact.

As you can see there were quite some "requirements" to be met to get this thing called FFindr started. Information about Frisbee events existed plentiful, the problem was that you had to visit many websites to get what you wanted. Many local, incomplete Frisbee tournament calendars have been around, but you could never be sure that they were up to date. In addition, to promote your own Frisbee tourney, you had to be subscribed to a bunch of mailing lists to get the word out. Many inconveniences that should not exist in times where everybody is part of this big cloud called Internet.

What has been the most difficult part of the project?

There are two major axis of development, the first is technical work the second concerns marketing efforts. To tackle the first, many years of work experience in the world of web development, frontend engineering and interface design helped to quickly choose and understand a powerful php framework: symfony (which was quite young at the time, but continue to prosper and still proves to be the right choice). During the last two years, symfony in conjunction with FFindr has heavily broadened my understanding and knowledge of web development, also leading to the daytime job I'm currently doing.

The second point was very new to me. Making a service known, taking advantage of networking and learning how to channel input from users is a big task, eating up much more time than expected. I definitely underestimated the effort it takes to handle the latter, which in total represents half of the work I do on FFindr.

Finally, a still critical part of the project is getting people to share content. I thought it would be much easier to convince people to promote their teams and tournaments on one single spot rather than on multiple platforms (mailinglists, own websites, different manually administered calendars). This still is a major issue since I still spend a lot of time on completing FFindr's calendars by searching mailing lists and other websites. Ideally there should be one or two persons per country doing the job, but this is unfortunately not (yet) the case.

Has everything worked as planned, or has the size and popularity of it surprised you?

Actually I thought that the service will be accepted much faster. But it turned out that the Frisbee world has shown to be less favourable of such a new service than expected (like every other community too I guess). This is probably a common error of "technical people" like myself, overestimating the will of people to adopt something new. Now, two years after the launch, audience is where I expected it to be after 6-12 months. I just hope that growth continues and that in 1-2 years time FFindr really gets adopted and integrated into the Frisbee life.

What are the latest features that you're excited about on the site?

I like this question, just because I'm very excited about the site and its possibilities. Since the launch there's feature after feature that excites me and pushes me to spend time on it. Next to my daytime job it is not always fun to spend hours on weekends and during the nights, but their usefulness and the feedback from the community totally endorses me.

To answer the question, there is actually a bunch of exciting features that recently launched. For instance the tournament registration. The tournament director/administrator (the person who can edit the tournament's event page on FFindr) can set up a fully automated online registration within minutes - including everything one could expect. Actually it is much too complicated to describe all the process here, better you just test it (either by setting up an online registration on FFindr, or by submitting a bid to a FFindr-powered online registration).

While using FFindr please keep in mind that anything can be done, so don't hesitate to report problems, usability issues or things that might be missing in your opinion. I also recommend to follow the FFindr blog to learn about all the frequent updates and new features, that's also the place where new features can be asked and discussed — allowing you to participate in the decision process about FFindr's future.

What’s the next step for you and FFindr?

This is a good question, and I could write tons of lines about that. I am currently working on custom team calendars (e.g. events that a team attended or plans to attend), allowing everybody to "shop for tournaments" and save them in custom calendars. These custom calendars can be exported to Google Calendar, iPhone, Outlook or whatever else time management software you are using or simply integrated into a website via RSS.

In the long run I have far too many ideas to list them here. I definitely should go full-time for FFindr, which for now remains only an ambitious dream. Among others I think for instance to:

create a basic and location-based iPhone website,
integrate team roster management,
integrate score reporting (with live reporting),
integrate an algorithm to randomly (and fairly) create teams for hat tournaments.

And this is only what I can think of, so imagine many more great ideas of FFindr users. By the way, the current shape of FFindr is mainly a result of numerous demands and ideas of users. Thanks for now, I hope that I could give some interesting insights into FFindr. As usual, please don't hesitate to ask back. Feedback is more than welcome.

Thanks a lot Christian, and best of luck in the future!

Thanks Marko and IFDA for asking many right questions, triggering responses peppered with background information. Keep up the good word on your Newsletter!

Featured tournament: Winter Trophy

Wed, 11 Nov 09 00:00:00 +0100

It has been quiet regarding the FFindr featured tournament, the last article dates from July. Firstly because I'm running out of inspirations (feel free to propose your favourite tourneys!), secondly because I'm currently more focussed on development rather than on writing (feel free to propose yourself as a columnist!). Anyway the series has not been forgotten, instead it is opening up new fields: for the first time an Indoor tournament is featured.

I'm talking about the probably oldest annual and still running Frisbee tournament in the world: the Winter Trophy in Gothenburg, Sweden. Stefan from Skogshyddan kindly answered five questions, providing us with it a bunch of interesting information about the tournament and Ultimate Frisbee in Sweden. Here you go...

The tournament dates back to 1979, this is an incredible history spanning 2-3 generations of players. Do you remember the first edition? What changed compared to today?

None of the organizers are still active today. I personally have played the Winter Trophy since 1989. Of course the tournament has grown over the years. There is one team, other than Skogshyddan, that has played in the Winter Trophy since 1979, KFUM Örebro (former known as SFMSC). The first two years there were only a few Open teams that were competing for the gold medals. But since 1981 there has been both Open and Women´s teams. Since the beginning of the nineties the tournament is held in a sports complex featuring five full size courts, 32 Open teams and 16 women´s team. The quality of the game has improved for every year. Even in the early day’s teams from all over cross northern Europe has come to Göteborg to participate in the tournament. I think this has motivated teams to work harder, watching and playing against other teams than what their used to.

How did the Winter Trophy influence the local Ultimate scene, is Skogshyddan—one of Europe's elite teams—also a result of this event?

In the eighties there were two teams dominating Swedish ultimate, Stenungsund won almost every championship indoors and KFUM Örebro every championship outdoors. But for some reason Skogshyddan have always played well in the Winter Trophy, ending among the top three almost every year. The Winter Trophy has become a highlight for many teams not just in Sweden. Teams know that the quality of play is high and therefore working hard to send their top team. The Winter Trophy has almost become like an indoor European Championship. Playing the Winter Trophy Skogshyddan has gotten the chance to play against the top teams in Europe. This has motivated the team to work hard. All the work has paid off; in the last seven years Skogshyddan has won five of them.

What are the main hurdles to take during the organization of the event? Are there any particularly tough problems to solve? (fields, party, finding enough teams)

To play in the Sports complex we have to book a weekend for the tournament years ahead. For many years the tournament has been played in January but this year we had to move it due to a Floorball tournament. We're having trouble getting people understand what Ultimate is all about. Though Ultimate has been played for over thirty years in Göteborg, a few years ago we ended up in an indoor arena build for athletics. This tells something about what they know about Ultimate.

In the beginning we didn't work that hard finding accommodation and organizing parties, most of the teams stayed at some local school using sleeping bags. The last five years we have been working hard getting in contact with local hotels and suppliers of fruit and all kinds of other stuff. Nowadays we offer the teams a player’s package for a moderate amount of money consisting two nights at a nearby hotel, continental breakfast, dinner Saturday night, Saturday night party, free fruit during all tournament. This has been highly appreciated among the teams, and has made the tournament even better.

Finding teams has not being a problem over the years, most years we have had to put teams on a waiting list. For a few years now we have had teams from countries like Russia and Estonia. This year a team from India has registered for the tournament. This must mean that the tournament has a really good reputation among players and teams.

Do all participating teams have a shot at the title? (How about seeding and the format, how many games per team, how long are the games)

Every team has a shot for the title. First there is pool play, four teams in each pool, and then the top two teams in each pool gets a spot in quarter finals. Team three and four in every pool ends up in “quarter finals” playing for 17th place. Every team gets to play six games. Because of the format and number of teams games are played to 13 or 25 minutes. We also use the Paganello rule, if a team leads by two points or more when time cap, game is over.

Finally, could you tell us a little about the Swedish Ultimate community (number of players, teams, Ultimate hot-spots), that produced top teams and players for many decades now?

In Sweden there are not that many playing Ultimate. The sport is getting better known; almost every high school is playing Ultimate in some form, but it's very difficult to recruit new players. Hopefully things are about to change, this year Sweden sent around 80 juniors to compete in the EUJC in Vienna. The Swedish junior women’s team won the gold medal while the Swedish juniors lost in the semis against the Finnish team by one point, ending up at 3th place.

In the Open division there are three top teams. Skogshyddan is the defending national champion by winning their fourth consecutive title this summer. The team has been working really hard the last years to be one of the top teams in Europe. In Wonderful Copenhagen’s seven year history Skogshyddan has won the tournament six times, in the last four years the team has two gold medals and two silver medals playing the European Ultimate Championship Series. Viksjöfors from the northern part of Sweden has become a real contender for the national title. Playing since they all were juniors they have really stepped it up the last couple of years. Last year in Vancouver for the World Championships the Swedish national team consisted of players almost only from Skogshyddan and Viksjöfors. An upcoming team is KFUM Örebro, a team that has a lot of younger talented players. Since 1979 when the first national championship were played in Sweden KFUM Örebro has finished top three every year, under a fifteen year long period (1979-1993) they became national champions thirteen times!

For next year Skogshyddan is working even harder than before going to WUCC in Prague well prepared for the US teams. I think in Prague both Viksjöfors and KFUM Örebro would like to show that they also are among the top teams in Europe.

Thank for for your time, Stefan, and all the best for this new edition of Gothenburg's Winter Trophy!

Who will take home the title of this 32nd edition? Three teams stood out in the their divisions lately: Open teams Skogshyddan (third 2006, winner 2007, 2008 and 2009), Viksjöfors (winner 2006, runner-up 2007 and 2008) and Karhukopla (third 2008, runner-up 2009) will certainly have a word to say. As for the girls, Flying Circus (runner-up 2006 and 2007), Gronical Dizziness (third place in 2008 and 2009) and DNT (winner 2007, runner-up 2008) might be teams to look for. All positions of the last four editions: 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Have a nice winter.

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.