1000!

Celebrating a lot of articles

By Martin Joergensen

When browsing the GFF site map this morning I noticed a special number in the text accompanying the list of articles.

999! - now it's more of course. At least 1000.

Carlos Heinsohn's article on the pattern Lake Champ was entry number 999 in the site map.
In other words: the next article to be published would be number 1000!

We usually try to celebrate any occasion here on the Global FlyFisher, not forgetting to hold the spirit high and being proud of our heritage, which reaches back to the childhood of the Internet and back when we all had hair on our heads and way less volume around the waist.

Now, 1000 is not like the finite number of articles on this site. Because of the way things are organized, we have way more articles than the entries in the site map reveals. Many articles don't have an entry and many larger pieces consist of more than one article, but still have only one entry. On the other hand we have stuff in the site map, which is kind of exaggerated because it's split into its individual parts.

But never the less: this IS entry number 1000!

And what have we published over the years. Well, I have set up a wheel of fortune, which selects four random articles, and shows them below. The system tries to spread them out a bit, selecting articles, which are evenly from the past almost 15 years of GFF history.

Let's look at some numbers apart from the 1000.

GFF draws about 180-200 gigabytes of data per month from the web server. The Chinese take the largest part of that – almost 41 gigabytes. I wonder why they have suddenly become so interested in fly fishing... the truth is that it's the mp3-files from our podcasts, which have the Asian interest. They probably think it's Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera.

But it's the images, which are the real traffic hound here. We server about 35% percent of our traffic as images. Close to 60 Gigabytes a month.

We have about 60,000-80,000 unique visitors every month, and they look at close to one million pages.

We served 96 pages to Iran already in June. Lets hope it was Ahmeddinejad, Mousavi and Khamenei that were planning to go flyfishing. Not likely, but it could certainly ease the tension in the country if they were to wet a fly together.
Iran might have fly fishing. Most mountainous countries have, and if nothing else, they can fish for escaped hatchery fish. Look at some of the waters shown in Helma's Photoblog and tell me there's no fishing in this beautiful country.

Maybe a similar tactic would work with Israel and the Palestines? Israeli looked at 485 pages so far this month, while the Palestinians only looked at 13 in the same period – at least from the Palestine territories... whatever they might be.

People from each of the following countries saw one and only one page here in June: Papua New Guinea, Suriname, Oman, Sudan, Aruba, Faroe Islands, Samoa Islands, Burkina Faso and Lebanon. I'm a bit surprised to see the Faroe Islands there. They do have fly fishing. I know. I've been there.

We don't know whether we served pages to North Korea. They obviously keep things very tight there. Kim Il Sung might have pulled the plug on GFF for the sake and safety of the people.

Well, enough politics for now. We don't want to offend anybody, so on to some fly fishing numbers.
Our most popular sections are the Patterns and the wallpapers. Quite a paradox, actually, because producing a wallpaper takes about 10 minutes, while producing a pattern article takes more like 10 hours, sometimes more.
If this was a business, and I was the boss, we would skip the patterns and do wallpapers only.
Luckily this is for fun, and I'm nowhere near being the boss.

Our tying section as well as the rod building section also are in the top ten range, but individual articles also thrive up there, in particular beginner's stuff such as knots and setting up a fly reel with line and leader. More advanced articles like LeaderCalc, Thornton's realistic flies, Classic wets and Czech nymphs do well too.
Number 100 is the Darth Vader Nymph. Number 500 in the list is The biology of bonefish and number 1000 is our keyword page.

So we're filling up.

And there's room for more!

We have lots of articles, reviews, images and great stories in the pipeline, but should you want to add even more towards articles #2000, just let us know.

We always welcome new quality material.