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The publishing pace is not frightening on the Global FlyFisher, but I’m working on cranking up the frequency ... bit by bit

The Global FlyFisher has once again been moved to a new publishing system, and things have changed – but are basically still the same

I’m a good bit into upgrading the Global FlyFisher to the latest version of the publishing system. Meanwhile the old site is gasping

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

30 years ... thirty years, like three decades. That’s how old this site is, and that’s actually quite a feat.

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.

For a painfully long time in August 2023 the Global FlyFisher was dead and gone. Our DNS-provider stumbled and took all their clients with them in the fall.

The site is back and in operation, but the downtime has led to some unfortunate errors, which I’m trying to fix as you read this

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

It’s been one and a half years since I started accepting donations to keep the site running, and the support has been overwhelming!

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.

The renowned streamer aficionado site streamers365.com is shutting down, but GFF has "inherited" all its fantastic content.

You won’t find many web sites, which have been running for 25 years, and I seriously doubt that any current fly fishing sites have a quarter century long history

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.

We have moved from an apartment to a house, and GFF is getting a larger and better equipped main office.

No, don't worry! It's not that GFF is disappearing, but the number of visitors isn’t what it used to be.

I'm surprised how little web publishers cherish their old URLs. When I browse old links to the outside from our articles, I constantly meet 404-pages. I value GFF’s old web-addresses, and here's how I maintain them.

Facebook is a strange universe. A fantastic resource and at the same time a source of endless, useless noise.

Google can pick up quite a lot of structured information from your site, and you can help by presenting it correctly

Just the other day the Global FlyFisher crossed the 50,000 node nid mark in the database. GFF is a large site, but still far from any boundaries set by Drupal.

So another year has passed... and what then, did that year bring for the Global FlyFisher... and what about 2017?

Here's a rundown of the different things I do to keep spammers from posting on the Global FlyFisher

A lot of sites feature a part of the page – typically a top menu – that is fixed to the top of the screen when you scroll down. Here are some thoughts about such a feature and how to do it.

This is the story about the adaptation of the old LeaderCalc spreadsheet to a Drupal module that drives a web based system

The Drupal theme that's used on the Global FlyFisher is home made from scratch. I deplore large and complex themes, and prefer simple and compact.

I reinstated the GFF Newsletter that we stopped sending a decade ago. This article is about the system driving the new newsletter.

This section tells a bit about the technology behind and development of the Global FlyFisher. Nothing at all about fishing or fly tying, but interesting to some.

It's amazing how some companies manage to totally ignore all attempts to contact them. Why do they have email, contact forms and Facebook pages, if they don't reply when people use them?

I'm working on a revival of the Global FlyFisher Newsletter, which was sent out for a short period many years ago.

Ever so often I get a mail asking if I would like to have guest posts on the Global FlyFisher. I have turned down every offer until now and here's why.

...almost. The new site is running smoothly and things have settled in. Traffic is stable and most pages are adapted to the new design.

The Global FlyFisher has changed! And in a major way. The content is the same but the look and the system behind is very different. We do expect some glitches in the beginning, so be patient.

You might have noticed that the Global FlyFisher has been a little quiet lately. It's not because we're on vacation. We're working on a major site upgrade!

We're breaking the oath that we have sworn so many times. GFF needs money and might soon start having ads.

So we went from 2012 to 2013, and GFF is still running smoothly with a good frequency of articles and videos and lots of readers and viewers

Blogs are very common these days, and we have one too. But ours started back when blogs were an almost unknown concept - in 1996!

I'm back in the saddle, vacation is over and GFF has been taking care of itself for a few weeks. Amazing how well it behaves... knock on wood!

The Kickstarter fundraising campaign for the Fish On project is done and Travis Swartz can now move forward in the process of producing the film about men fly-fishing as a part of the process recovering from cancer.

Travis Swartz spends a lot of time on the water alone, but this past weekend he spent a couple days on the Big Wood River in Ketchum, Idaho fishing with his friends Reese, John and Zach.

The Global FlyFisher is a web site for fly fishers and fly tyers - and to some extend for outdoors people in general. The site has a very long history, dating back to the beginning of the Internet era in 1994.

GFF has been looking the same for almost a decade, and even though we haven't changed anything radical, there are changes in appearance.

If we look back in our archives of GFF screenshots we can see that the front page has essentially looked the same for almost 10 years.
If you take a swing by the Waybackmachine maintained by archive.org, you can see screen dumps dating back to 1999. GFF has existed longer than that, but under different names and URL's.

Yes, this is another of those non-flyfishing articles! Sorry about that for all you flyfishing fans, but I just like writing about the ins and outs of running the site.

Well it's obviously that time of the year - or whatever time it is - because we are moving the site to a new server.

Regular visitors on GFF will have noticed an absence of the site the latest 24 hours or so... here's why.

We have passed yet another New Year's evening, and can now write 2011. So how was 2010 for GFF? We celebrated our 16th birthday in 2010. We served 12 million pages to 850,000 people. We published 66 articles. We added more than 500 videos. Still we think we're lagging a bit.

Here at GFF we don't hesitate to celebrate any occasion, which marks a milestone in the the history of this site and its progress. And here's another such milestone: this very article is actually entry number 1000 in our list of entries in the sitemap. A really sharp corner.

The rhythm of articles on the Global FlyFisher. How many articles, videos, reviews etc. we published every month since way back, and an option to see the content of each month.

Things are coming into gear on the new GFF server

GFF now runs from a US server - with a few hiccups

OK, we have moved the first part of GFF. Now the rest is on its way.

GFF is now spanning the Atlantic

Yes, it's time to get GFF to a new and better server

Christmas and New Year - it's time for the last trip of the year

We are (once again) moving server. This time to save money on traffic. Wanna help test the new server?

You may see irregularities on GFF. We're upgrading.

Another nail in the never-ending server blues coffin

If you are Jack, we're the beanstalk: we just keep growing

Two things that we hold in high esteem on GFF

We have used the same forum system for a long time

It seems to be the story of this site...

The Global FlyFisher started as a stroke of luck, a flap of a butterfly's wing, a mere coincidence - more than 10 years ago. This is the previously untold story of one of the world's largest and most popular fly fishing web sites: your very own, the Global FlyFisher.

The Grand Opening of Global FlyFisher as we know it was announced to the world in April 1999. We sent out a "press release".

GFF has moved - not that you should feel any difference

It happens every other month - GFF runs out of disk space

One of the precursors for GFF was all B/W

The GFF Blog passed its 100'th day

We have long planned on adding some kind of automation to the system behinnd GFF