Another year on GFF

Some years I do it, some years I don't: write a state of the GFF nation blog post.
Well, this year I do, and this is it.

Closing in on 20

2013 will be the 19th year that GFF is online in some form or incarnation. 19 years!
You will find material on the site, which has a first publishing date in 1994. Some of our readers probably hadn't started fly-fishing back then, and a few weren't even born.
Well, GFF might be old (in Internet terms it's a Methusalem), but the site is aging in a very good way if you ask me, getting better and better and steadily increasing in size and popularity.

So what happened in 2012?

Not much really, except for a steady flow of new content. The stats say:
- 141 articles or just under 12 articles per month (there are 1.335 published articles)
- 1455 videos or just shy of 4 a day every day (there are 2.700 published videos)

And of course also a steady flow of visitors. A few numbers again:
- close to 17 million pages shown
- 2.8 million individual visits
That's about 7.500 visits a day, 320 per hour or 5 per minute. Since every visit typically takes 5 minutes you are in the virtual company of about 25 other GFF visitors during a session here... not that you feel their presence.

So enough of those boring numbers, Martin! What's new! What's planned!

News

Martin Joergensen

News section

Well, the news section is new. Christmas a couple of years ago I made the video section, which has been extremely successful, so I thought I'd try my luck with some new stuff this Christmas too. I had long wanted somewhere to put the different happenings and events in the community, not to mention product news. I programmed a small system to handle news, integrated into our image system, the keywords and whatnot.
I'm not expecting anything like the success of the videos (that will be hard to beat with anything), but it seems to have taken nicely off this first week.
So if you have news, let me know. I now have a place to put it.

Adapted front page

The main page has also gotten a small overhaul. Nothing big, but since there is now four sections with potential new content: articles, videos, news and this blog, I thought it would be nice with a so called slider that presents more content in the same space, fading between each section's new content.
It stops when you put your mouse over it, and you can manually shift between the blocks.

Future plans

So what will come?
I honestly don't know!

Tonnes of articles of course. I keep on writing them and get more article ideas than I could write even if I did this full time, which I don't. GFF is still just a hobby project that's done in mine and other people's spare time. Suggestions are welcome.
There will be more merchandize in our store. Maybe a cap, more things with flies on them. Whatever I can think of. Suggestions are welcome.
I have my old idea list of "semi-dead" ideas. Some might spring to life.
I have thought of making a crowd funding page to recoup some of the expenses. Don't know if that will ever happen. Sometimes it's easier to just shell the money. Suggestions are welcome.

But no matter what: The Global FlyFisher will just get better, larger and hopefully more popular.