About GFF

It's time for another of these major updates of the tech behind the Global FlyFisher

For basically all the almost 30 years of its existence, I have been following the traffic patterns on GFF. I stopped about a year ago, and here is why.

GFF is running on Drupal 7, and Drupal 7 is terminal. It’s destined to die. And upgrading is not an easy task, not least because version 10 is already there.

Maintaining a site with close to 18,000 pictures, 11,000+ video links and close to 3,000 articles means having a lot of stuff to keep up-to-date

Social media can be a strange experience. It's really a mixed bag. And on Instagram 40% of all anglers seem to be women!

I have build a small Drupal-module, which enables me to see how many recipients open my newsletters and click on links in it

There’s a bunch of modules to help importing content into Drupal. My experience is that they are inadequate, and don’t do what I need. I prefer DIY.

Yes, a non-native English speaker proofreads material from a host of mostly non-English amateur writers, and sometimes errors do slip through

Dave Stewart from the podcast "Wet Fly Swing" contacted me for participation in one of his podcasts, and it’s now online to enjoy.

The blocks of nicely laid out images on GFF has required quite a bit of work to refine.

Lazy loading is a performance improvement where images (and other assets) are loaded when needed, not when the page is loaded

The publishing pace on GFF has almost come to a standstill. Real life has stuck its ugly head in the door and brought paid work

No, not strikes from fish, but strikes from spammers and wannabe guest posters who try to get their spam published on GFF. Three strikes and they get this.

It seems to me that a lot of software problems are solved by adding complexity. It's a bad solution. I hate it.

If you do, you might consider supporting it in a slightly more substantial way. It's been free for decades... literally... but could use a little saltwater injection. Now accepting PayPal...

My fly tying room and office is slowly taking shape - and color. A set of shelves and small chests were painted green.

The GFF video section uses a few neat cowboy tricks to smoothly integrate videos from YouTube and Vimeo into the site