ffindr! find Frisbee anywhere. ffindr the blog! Information about Frisbee events and its Web portal

Roadmap completed, online registration available

Sun, 28 Jun 09 00:00:00 +0200

I proudly announce the completion of the roadmap imposed end of last year. Every announced feature has been released in time, with the registration process as the last item today. The latter caused quite a heavy workload, but all that counts is the fact that the feature is implemented and available for everybody now.

Two events tested the registration during June:

the Summerlove with 140+ individual subscriptions for Paris' Hat Summer League, and
Scottish tournament MacBeach looking to find 12 teams to chase plastic on the beach of Troon.

After having organised a summer league with 100+ players last year I really felt the need for a tool that takes care of ever-changing excel sheets and tons of back-and-forth e-mailing. The now available new automated online bid submission system offers exactly this.

All you need is the ownership of a ffindr event website (this is easy, just add your tourney or ask for transferral of ownership if your tourney has been created by someone else). You then have the option to Create an online registration for this event. Then you are asked to provide a contact e-mail address, the number of available spots, the registration period and the content of the confirmation e-mail that each subscriber will receive. In addition you can define questions that everybody who wants to send a bid (i.e. want to participate) should answer. You can choose between three kinds of answers:

a text answer which is totally up to the bidder
you provide one or more answers to choose one from or
one or more answers to choose many.

And that's all, your job is now to watch the bids flying in. You will get a copy of each confirmation e-mail, plus a link to an ever up-to-date Excel file that reflects all submitted bids. ffindr certainly allows you to edit the submitted bids, actually even the bidders themselves can modify their submitted bids... they just need to be logged in during bid submission.

Once the registration is closed and you made your choice among the bids (you can move the bids around between the selected and waiting list by easy drag&drop), everything is ready to send out the invitations. To do so, just click on Announce selection and close registration, adapt the e-mail content for your invitation and refusal mails and confirm. Congrats, you just informed everybody about its status (whether he is invited or he is sitting on the waiting list). That's all the magic.

Back to roadmapping. So the first half of 2009 is done, ready to attack the second. But this time I won't impose such a tough roadmap with a steady workload. I must admit that I probably spent a little too much time on ffindr (unfortunately ffindr is still a side-project only, which means that I have to work on it during evenings, nights and weekends). There are still heaps of smaller tunings to do that are mostly invisible to the user but that need to get done. Concentrating on this and reserving some time for eventual bug fixes and smaller user requests will keep me occupied during the next six month.

And finally there is quite some evangelisation work to do. Somehow the Frisbee world has to learn how much life can be easier by using the new tournament registration on ffindr. I invite you to help me with this... and to keep the suggestions flowing. ffindr is you, ffindr is us.

ffindr in May 2009

Wed, 03 Jun 09 00:00:00 +0200

Good weather everywhere, which automatically means that people spend less time in front of their computers and more time outside -- ideally on Frisbee pitches. That's good, although it leads to stagnating visitors and page views (this good-weather-regression is true for any big website by the way). In the following ffindr's monthly visitors check:

May 2009 attracted 12,750 visitors (-1,250 compared to the previous month) from 109 countries (-11) accessing precisely 40,001 page views (-2,500).

All quiet in the top ten visitor ranking by country. Only Italy dropped three positions, definitely because Italians enjoy the good weather even more. Interesting to see that Frisbee-nation Australia is finally approaching the top ten with a current share of 1.44% on position 14.

United States 22.46% (1. with 26.09% in April)
Germany 14.36% (2. with 12.43%)
France 10.30% (3. with 9.92%)
United Kingdom 8.83% (4. with 9.53%)
Canada 6.48% (5. with 4.86%)
Switzerland 4.00% (7. with 3.19%)
Spain 3.08% (9. with 2.87%)
Belgium 3.08% (8. with 3.12%)
Italy 2.43% (6. with 4.00%)
Austria 2.18% (10. with 1.84%)

Australification also shows its effect in the city top ten, with newcomer Melbourne on tenth place. London continues to close the once huge gap to long-time leader Paris, whereas Warsaw (now 14.) and Seattle (now 34.) dropped out of the top ten.

Paris 3.80% (1. with 3.88% in April)
London 3.53% (2. with 3.39%)
Dublin 1.85% (3. with 1.34%)
Zurich 1.68% (6. with 1.09%)
Berlin 1.58% (4. with 1.10%)
Vienna 1.36% (8. with 1.07%)
New York 1.26% (5. with 1.10%)
Munich 0.87% (7. with 1.07%)
Madrid 0.86% (12. with 0.77%)
Melbourne 0.83% (38. with 0.41%)

Finally -- to continue the recently started habit of monthly statistics reviews -- a look at the most visited tournaments on ffindr:

White Mountain Open 2009 (297 views)
20th Talampaya Coed & Open Challenge 268 views
Bibione 2009 (228)
Wonderful Copenhagen Ultimate 2009 (220 views)
eXtended European Ultimate Championship Final 2009 (159 views)
G Spot 2009 (177 views)
Whose Baby 2009 (151 views)
Tom's Tourney 2000 (131 views)
Swiss Championships 2009 Round 1 (130 views)
WD40 Spring Lube 2009 (128 views)

The soon-to-be-announced Paris Summer League will be the first event to use ffindr's online registration. Work on the latter is quite a brainteaser, nevertheless I hope (hope just because what's true for visitors is also true for developers: better weather automatically means less time for development) to have a working solution within 10 days.

Heading towards a full-service Frisbee tournament website

Tue, 19 May 09 00:00:00 +0200

While working on the tournament registration process, I realise more and more that the future of ffindr lies in a full-service website for Frisbee tournaments. I'm very pleased with the soon-to-be available functionality, and I really think that it will help to make the hard life of tournament organisers a lot easier.

I plan to release the new registration feature in about one month, starting with a private test run for some tournaments. The system will enable tournament organisers to setup a registration process for a specified time frame and with a user-defined bid questionnaire (i.e. you can ask the bidders all the questions you like). Each submitted bid will then trigger

an update of the list of subscribed teams on the tournament's page
a notification e-mail to the bidder as well as the tournament director (i.e. to the e-mail address provided for the registration in question)
an update of the universally accessible (via a unique address) Excel-file stating all the submitted bids in detail

When registration closes, the administrator (i.e. the person who launched the registration) is invited to make his selection among the submitted bids on ffindr. Once the selection got confirmed, ffindr will automatically notify all bidders regarding the status of their bid by e-mail.

Finally, the list of accepted teams can be modified and/or completed with teams from the waiting list any time by the registration administrator. The list of currently subscribed teams/players, as well as the list of selected teams and the waiting list, can always be consulted on the tournament website. This will lead to a transparent registration process and thus reduce the numerous back-and-forth e-mails regarding the registration status.

The system is suited for team bids and for individual players (e.g. hat tournaments) alike.

If you are a tournament organiser and your event will happen in around 2 or 3 months, I invite you to test the new service. If you are interested in exploring the new feature and you have scheduled its registration period for around July/August, please contact me now!

Back to the long-term vision addressed in the title of this post. For now ffindr offers, next to the collection of global calendars of Frisbee happenings, free and easy to set-up tournament websites with a location map, a trip planner and a contact form. Adding the automated tournament sign-up and team/player selection process makes it two free services for tournament directors (TD).

For now I can imagine the following additional features for future releases:

an automated tournament schedule planner, based on the selected (and ranked) teams
live score updates by everybody, based on the games produced by the previously mentioned schedule planner

Anything else that a desperate Frisbee tournament director could dream of? Any ideas are welcome and might find their way directly into the new roadbook of future ffindr developments/features. For now it looks like I will try to create a smart league integration to remedy their current status quo within the tournament section.

Taking a look at april

Tue, 05 May 09 00:00:00 +0200

Yet another review of the previous month’s visitors statistics, for the ninth time since the ffindr blog’s first post almost a year ago. Nine reports of uninterrupted growth, take a look back to compare the figures... Mai ’08, June ’08, September ’08, November ’08, December ’08, January ’09, February ’09, March ’09.

Following the steady growth, also April 2009 brought some records: unmatched 14,000 visitors (+1,200) from 120 countries (+3) browsed almost 42,500 pages (-1,500 compared to March)! That makes up a nice little village of Frisbee folks.

The top ten of visits by country features the same ten nations as last month. UK is coming very close to the top three, and Italy stepped up to the four percent share of users.

United States 26.09% (1. with 30.46% in March)
Germany 12.43% (3. with 11.57%)
France 9.92% (2. with 12.22%)
United Kingdom 9.53% (4. with 7.68%)
Canada 4.86% (5. with 4.80%)
Italy 4.00% (7. with 2.59%)
Switzerland 3.19% (6. with 2.67%)
Belgium 3.12% (10. with 2.19%)
Spain 2.87% (9. with 2.44%)
Austria 1.84% (8. with 2.47%)

Things are getting closer and closer on city level, with ffindr-hometown Paris loosing more and more of its share (which is a good sign). Ultimate hotspots Seattle (US) and Munich (Germany) made it for the first time into the top ten, with ffindr-veteran Warsaw back on the list.

Paris 3.88% (1. with 5.45% in March)
London 3.39% (2. with 2.66%)
Dublin 1.34% (5. with 1.37%)
Berlin 1.10% (7. with 1.04%)
New York 1.10% (4. with 1.41%)
Zurich 1.09% (6. with 1.10%)
Munich 1.07% (13. with 0.74%)
Vienna 1.07% (3. with 1.65%)
Seattle 0.86% (15. with 0.68%)
Warsaw 0.80% (12. with 0.78%)

And finally a look at the most visited tournaments on ffindr, with three Italian Beach Ultimate tournaments on the top. Paganello clearly underlined its incomparable popularity with outstanding 1,560 hits. Definitely the place to go, be there next year.

Paganello 2009: Alea Iacta Est! (1,560 views)
Festival Italia 2009 (251)
Bibione 2009 (218)
Huck Finn 2009 (202)
Sky Bowl 2009 (196)
Lloret - Costa Brava Tournament 2009 (184)
Tom's Tourney 2009 (180)
2009 Metro East Regionals (180)
Davis Ultimate Invite 2009 (182)
April Fools Fest 2009 (177)

If the growing popularity of ffindr mirrors the overall popularity of Frisbee (and Ultimate in particular), things look good for our sport. And besides the numbers and figures there are also other (more serious?) indicators for the increasing popularity of Ultimate Frisbee: such as a recently published article on the New York Times stating that Ultimate Frisbee Takes Off...

"In the last 10 years, Ultimate Frisbee has become one of the world’s fastest-growing sports. It is played in more than 42 countries. Ultimate’s success at the college level, attracting traditional athletes from other sports like soccer and football to compete on its teams, is largely what has elevated the game to this stage."

All in all I conclude that there are good chances that also the number of ffindr users continues to grow. In the meanwhile I’m working on new features (did I mention the automated registration process?) to make ffindr ever more useful.

Featured tournament: Tom's Tourney

Sun, 26 Apr 09 00:00:00 +0200

Next weekend will see the 17th edition of an international Ultimate tournament in Brugge, Belgium: Tom's Tourney 2009 or just TT. The 17 editions saw 11 winners, with the Red Lights from Amsterdam dominating the hall of fame:

4 victories

Red Lights (Netherlands) in 1996, 1999, 2001 and 2002

2 victories

CUSB La Fotta (Italy) in 2007 and 2008
Iznogood (France) in 2000 and 2003
Dutch National Team (Netherlands) in 1994 and 2000

1 victory

Cota Rica (Italy) in 2006
Ultimate Vibration (France) in 2005
Fruehsport 0,4 (Germany) in 2004
Violently Happy (United Kingdom) in 1998
Tartarus (USA) in 1997
Fluid Druids (United Kingdom) in 1995
XLR8RS (Belgium) in 1992

TT is the 8th featured tournament on ffindr, after the Boracay Open (Boracay, Philippines), Lei-Out (Los Angeles, USA), Disco Volador 2006 (Bogota, Colombia), Coman Fruta Cabrónes (Tenerife, Spain), UPA Championships (Sarasota, USA), European Ultimate Championships Finals (Paris, France) and the Monkey Foo Tournament (Bourg d'Oisans, France). Tournament director Glenn kindly accepted to answer the following seven questions, read on for some interesting insights on Belgium's premier Ultimate Frisbee tournament.

1. How and when did everything start? How did the TT change and evolve compared to the early 1990s?

It all started in the summer of 1991 when we first thought about organising our own ultimate tournament in Brugge. We looked for a good location, a good date, and accommodation. The very first international ultimate tournament in Brugge was held in the weekend of 2 and 3 May 1992. We had 9 teams coming from Belgium, France and Germany. XLR8RS was the first winner. In 1993 registrations didn’t come in as expected so we decided to cancel. After we cancelled we had several teams still wanting to come but it was too late, so no tournament.

In 1994 we tried again on a different and bigger location with 5 fields. We had 20 teams, which was very much ok.

Then in December 1996 Tom had his motorcycle accident. We decided to name our international tournament Tom’s Tourney. The tourneys of 1995 until 2001 were all played on the old location with 5 fields, so 24 teams was a maximum.

Because Brugge was the cultural capital of Europe in 2002, we had to find another location because the fields were being used as a parking… We moved to our current location which was a good decision because now we had al lot more fields. It’s more difficult because the fields are being used by several soccer teams, but since we have good support from the city we are able to use all the fields.

We had some more changes: in 2004 we started with a separate ladies division with 8 teams, in 2006 we changed the format to a 3-days tournament, in 2008 we split the open division in a first and a second division.

2. What is the biggest hurdle to take during the organisation of the event? Are there any especially difficult problems to solve?

For instance taking care of the schedule, this is a very laborious and time-consuming job. A couple of years ago I created an automatic excel-sheet to make the filling out of the scores easier. All you have to do is fill out the results, and all the tables are automatically filled out and rankings are made. I’m quite proud of this system, but it was a hell of a job ;-) Since I first introduced this system the format changed a couple of times, so it also took a lot of time to change the excel-sheet. But since it saves us lots of time at the tournament it’s worth it !

And then the last couple of weeks it’s hoping that no teams cancel. We had drop-out in the ladies division last week, and for now we didn’t find a replacement team. It’s simply too close to TT to get organised for that backup-team.

3. How about seeding and the format? Is having two different Open divisions a good choice to respond to a wider range of players? How about a mixed division?

For the format, we always try to have a multiple of 4 in each division, but the last couple of years we always had some drop-outs at the last moment ... we do think it’s a good choice to have 2 open divisions. When we had 1 open division, the games on day 1 were too hard for the weaker teams and too easy for the strong teams, so in a 2 days tournament that wasn’t so good. Since we now have a 3-days tournament with 2 open divisions all games on every day are important. This year we had 96 registered teams for only 52 spots, so we think teams like the format too.

We don’t have immediate plans to set up a mixed division. In the second division, already several teams are mixed. And those are combined with less strong male teams.

The seeding isn’t easy as you know. We do this with a couple of players and try to make it as good as possible. Then we also try to divide the teams from the same country in the first round groups.

4. How do you think influenced the TT the local and Belgium Ultimate scene?

I think it helped Belgian ultimate grow: we try to have as many Belgian teams as possible, so I guess it’s a very good thing for Belgian teams being able to play many hard games against very good teams close to home. Other teams get to know the Belgian teams so they also have a bigger chance to enter tournaments abroad probably.

5. It seems that TT is just getting bigger and bigger, is this wanted and supported or does this just happen and you try to adapt as good as possible?

This is wanted and supported, but for the moment we reached the maximum possible. With the 11 fields we have, 52 teams is the maximum. The city has plans to add 2 more fields at the same site, but we don’t know when those fields will be ready, it could take up to 2 years and they haven’t started yet ... Once those fields are ready we could add 4 or 8 teams.

We already wanted to have 52 teams last year but we had some drop-outs in the ladies division so we ended up with 49.

6. As far as I know, Belgium has a quickly growing, fun-loving and spirited Frisbee community. What kind of people play Ultimate in Belgium?

The spirit is great, at Paganello only 3 Belgian teams were there but 2 of them managed to take the spirit back home! All sorts of people play ultimate, but several teams have a very good youth-training program, so a lot of young players entered the scene. The average age from all our players in Brugge is 23, we have 33 players younger than 20!

7. How does the selection process work for TT? What are the criteria to get in?

Needless to say it’s a tough job. We have some criteria: finalists of the last edition, spirit winners from the last edition, winners from the last 5 years are certain to have a spot. Then the real work starts ;-) we try to have as many countries as possible; we try to look at the strength of the team; if you were on the waiting list last year you have a bigger chance to come this year; if you enter an open and a ladies team you have a bigger chance to come. But you can have as many criteria as you want, you will always fail a number of teams which isn’t fun at all.

That's it. Many thanks to Glenn for your insightful replies, and congratulations for running such a successful tournament. Keep on the good work.

April 2009: State of things

Sat, 18 Apr 09 00:00:00 +0200

A great Paganello is over, congratulations to UTI for their impressive performance resulting in their third yellow umbrella (the Paganello trophy). I had an interesting talk in Rimini with Chris Oakman from PickupUltimate.com about the future of Frisbee web applications. We'll see if we can somehow cooperate to provide even better services for the Frisbee world. Not an easy undertaking since our projects are and will be developed only in our spare time. And the rule is simple: more time for the developers = more features and more useful services for the Frisbee community. Sponsorships might change this, but honestly I don't see any possibilities to professionalise things in the foreseeable future. Ideally I could imagine that advertising revenues plus sponsorship deals might suffice to pay a developer for one day/week. This would already make a significant difference, resulting in many more really sweet features.

Change of subject: Google recently honoured the usefulness of ffindr with an again increased page rank: the site is now ranked 6 on their scale from nothing (that's one below 0) to 10. Their page rank is a measure of a website's importance (or credibility), and six is a pretty good value.

By the way, every site that is listed on and linked to from ffindr takes automatically advantage of ffindr's high page rank. This is due to the fact that each page's page rank also depends on the page rank of websites that refer (link) to it. Sounds complicated, and actually is pretty complicated. All you should retain from this: get your team, tournament or whatever else of Frisbee information on ffindr to get found!

Besides this, development on the automated online registration process finally started. Database abstraction has long been done, now it's all about its implementation. Work advances smoothly, anyway I can't really tell how long this might take. Everything from one month to three I'd say... but I'll definitely finish and deliver it in time (i.e. by July 2009, following the roadmap established in December. This feature will bring ffindr yet another step closer towards a full service website for Frisbee tournaments.

All that happened in March 2009

Thu, 02 Apr 09 00:00:00 +0200

To avoid any kind of confusion I'll present the monthly access statistics review not today but tomorrow, i.e. today for you. An all time visitor high during March could wrongly suggest some April Fooling, but the following numbers are hard facts:

ffindr delivered more than 44,000 pages (+9,000 compared to February) to over 12,800 visitors (+3,300) from 117 countries (for instance Guam, Ivory Coast, Oman, Brunei and Trinidad and Tobago -- just to name some exotic ones).

No major changes in the country top ten; the US strengthened their leading position with a share of almost one third of all visitors and Austria is back in by swapping position with Poland (now 13.).

United States 30.46% (1. with 26.20% in February)
France 12.22% (2. with 15.15%)
Germany 11.57% (3. with 11.53%)
United Kingdom 7.68% (4. with 7.35%)
Canada 4.80% (5. with 3.22%)
Switzerland 2.67% (8. with 2.65%)
Italy 2.59% (9. with 2.62%)
Austria 2.47% (13. with 1,83%)
Spain 2.44% (6. with 2.96%)
Belgium 2.19% (7. with 2.85%)

Regarding visitors by city: three newcomers pushed from far behind into the top 10: Makati (part of Metro Manila, Philippines, definitely a result of the post about the Boracay Open), San Francisco (the city of UPA-champion Jam) and once again Nantes.

Paris 5.45% (1. with 6.68% in February)
London 2.66% (2. with 2.19%)
Vienna 1.65% (5. with 1.21%)
New York 1.41% (4. with 1.22%)
Dublin 1.37% (3. with 1.37%)
Zurich 1.10% (8. with 0.99%)
Berlin 1.04% (6. with 1.19%)
Makati 0.89% (33. with 0.40%)
Nantes 0.84% (22. with 0.54%)
San Francisco 0.81% (30. with 0.41%)

To conclude this statistics review, a look at the top visited tournaments on ffindr during March.

See you at Paganello, I'll play with French team Iznogood in the open division. Don't hesitate to contact me...

ffindr now with location-tailored homepage

Sun, 29 Mar 09 00:00:00 +0100

A long demanded feature has just been released: l10n (=localisation) of ffindr's homepage. Much time has been spent on technical enhancements, it was time to provide a visible and useful enhancement for the ffindr users.

Just bookmark (or remember) the country/continent subdomain of your choice and you'll get a perfectly tailored map and upcoming events list (plus RSS feed). No more click overhead to get the events you are interested in, now the homepage gets you right to the beef.

Pick your continent of choice...

Africa: http://africa.ffindr.com
Asia: http://asia.ffindr.com
Europe: http://europe.ffindr.com
North America: http://north-america.ffindr.com
Oceania: http://oceania.ffindr.com
South America: http://south-america.ffindr.com

...or your favourite country and have all its concerning Frisbee tournament information at once. The choice of the available country portals has been based on the visitors' origin: the top 25 ffindr countries got their own portal... plus Japan because there is still hope to get big in Japan!

Australia: http://australia.ffindr.com
Austria: http://austria.ffindr.com
Belgium: http://belgium.ffindr.com
Canada: http://canada.ffindr.com
Colombia: http://colombia.ffindr.com
Czech Republic: http://czech-republic.ffindr.com
Denmark: http://denmark.ffindr.com
Finland: http://finland.ffindr.com
France: http://france.ffindr.com
Germany: http://germany.ffindr.com
India: http://india.ffindr.com
Italy: http://italy.ffindr.com
Ireland: http://ireland.ffindr.com
Japan: http://japan.ffindr.com
Netherlands: http://netherlands.ffindr.com
Philippines: http://philippines.ffindr.com
Poland: http://poland.ffindr.com
Portugal: http://portugal.ffindr.com
Russia: http://russia.ffindr.com
Slovakia: http://slovakia.ffindr.com
Spain: http://spain.ffindr.com
Sweden: http://sweden.ffindr.com
Switzerland: http://switzerland.ffindr.com
United Kingdom: http://uk.ffindr.com
United States of America: http://usa.ffindr.com
Venezuela: http://venezuela.ffindr.com

One day I might redirect visitors right to the "correct" country portal based on their IP address. For now I consider this a little too intrusive. Just make it australia.ffindr.com (for instance) instead of ffindr.com to get where you want to; or simply pick a country/continent from the location selector on the upper right of the homepage. Feasible, no?

Heading towards version 2.2: new beta available

Sun, 22 Mar 09 00:00:00 +0100

The latest developments have just been uploaded to beta.ffindr.com, feel free to check it out and report malfunctions, strange behaviours, etc. This update follows the announced features of the roadmap of the first semester of 2009, plus a bunch of minor improvements.

The usual week of beta testing will be a little shorter this time, solely due to a nasty problem that stresses ffindr for some time now: item (tournament or link) pages break down due to a lack of sufficient server memory. I'm curious if any of you encountered the same problem, please report back if you once saw an unstyled page with some content but no graphics and layout at all. Every now and then this seems to happen, no idea what triggers this. I hope the new version will remedy the defects, comprehensive refactoring resulted in loads of merged code.

In addition the new version brings:

a powerful new search engine (accessible via the search box on the upper right) that allows for combined search terms (usage of and requires the results to contain both keywords, e.g. crown and jewels) and that spits out a weighted result list;
a pretty pager for the custom link filtering to avoid hundreds of results on a single page, plus the previously forgotten option to filter by disciplines;
a public option to create international links, that appear on the international link listing page;
an almost WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor to submit and modify pages with a decent preview
numbers behind the countries on the tournament page now states the upcoming event count only (contrary to all events before)

Now the next big feature can be attacked: the fully automated tournament subscription manager. The roadmap plans its release for this summer, and I'm confident to deliver in time. Sure that the ever improving weather plus a bunch of ulti tourneys will eat up loads of my spare time, but luckily these aspects have been considered during roadmapping. Enjoy the summer!

Featured tournament: Boracay Open

Fri, 06 Mar 09 00:00:00 +0100

European winter is slowly stepping back, making room for the outdoor season. After a month without any featured tournament, it's time to present yet another highlight in the Frisbee world calendar: the Boracay Open Beach Ultimate tournament on the Philippines.

The home team of the island of Boracay are the Boracay Dragons, a continuously growing Frisbee club of former dragon boat rowers. Unforgotten the impressive silver performance of nine Boracay Dragons that represented the Philippines at the second world Beach Ultimate championships in Macéio in late 2007.

How and when did everything start?

First year was 2003. The company run by one of our "founding fathers" started Manila Spirits (our international showcase tournament on grass) and then decided to start a beach tourney in Boracay. Wasn't very big at the start but it has grown each year since. Despite their very limited ultimate experience, the Boracay Dragons used their natural (and now legendary) speed on sand to reach the finals of their first Ultimate competition.

How did the tournament evolve during the last years?

It's gotten bigger and bigger. Beach Ultimate in Boracay has grown by leaps and bounds. One thing has stayed the same though -- the Dragons are unbeatable on their home turf.

What is the biggest hurdle to take during the organisation of the event?

Definitely finding sponsors. Since Ultimate is still a fringe/emerging sport in the Philippines, only a few companies are open to supporting the sport in a big way (the way corporations sponsor basketball or volleyball in the Philippines). But we're getting there.

Dealing with the crowds of people and events on the island can be a challenge. One of the reasons it was moved to March from May is the large numbers of tourists and events in May. The people can be a burden to deal with as the fields take up a large portion of the beach.

How does team selection works, how many teams/players to do expect?

We don't select teams. Whoever wants to play can play. There's just a 16 team cap due to the number of fields (we have 4).We have never had trouble accommodating all teams, but this year due to the tides, we have to impose a 16 team cap.

How about seeding and the format?

Final format still to be determined depending on final number of teams, but usually we have round robin play of 3 or 4 games and then playoffs. Number of teams, byes etc. will depend on number of teams and games we can play on the 4 fields. Seeding like every other tourney based on previous results and team line-ups. The Boracay Dragons are of course this year's number 1 seed.

Does the tourney have a positive impact on the local Ultimate scene?

Absolutely, especially in Boracay. The Dragons' success on the sand both in the Philippines, in Asia, and in Brazil has definitely played a huge part in helping propogate the sport on the island. It seems that the whole of Boracay can throw a forehand and backhand and own and sell Frisbees. It has pushed volleyball and beach soccer to the fringes. You walk up and down the beach and you'll see people playing or throwing.

Locally around the Philippines, it is also having an effect as beach tourneys are now popping up in other locations: Subic, Bagasbas, and most recently Corregidor Island.

A big thanks to Rick Cayzer who willingly answered the questions above. And finally, after reading the articles from "Jane and I" and scoutraven about the Dragons and last year's Boracay Open, I'd say that this is a tournament that is not to be missed. See you there in 2010!

To bridge this unpleasant long time gap I propose reading (and playing) of the previously presented featured tournaments:

Lei-Out (January 2009)
Disco Volador 2006 (November 2008)
Coman Fruta Cabrónes (November 2008)
UPA Championships (October 2008)
European Ultimate Championships Series (September 2008)
Monkey Foo Tournament (September 2008)

Don't hesitate to propose a tournament you especially like, maybe it'll become the next featured tournament on ffindr.

Looking back at February

Tue, 03 Mar 09 00:00:00 +0100

A short visitor analysis for a short month: almost 35,000 pages (as many as in January) got served to over 9,500 visitors (+300) from 108 countries (+4). Growth continues in Northern America, a two-sided article about ffindr in the recently published second issue of informative and glossy Ultimate Canada Magazine will strengthen this trend even more.

The US gained yet another five per cents of the visitor's origin cake. No further upsets on the remaining spots, with Poland replacing Ireland on the tenth position.

United States 26.20% (1. with 21.02% in January)
France 15.15% (2. with 14.57%)
Germany 11.53% (3. with 12.67%)
United Kingdom 7.35% (4. with 8.54%)
Canada 3.22% (8. with 3.25%)
Spain 2.96% (6. with 3.36%)
Belgium 2.85% (9. with 3.11%)
Switzerland 2.65% (5. with 3.43%)
Italy 2.62% (7. with 3.30%)
Poland 2.37% (12. with 2.14%)

After an all European city top ten in January, three cities from the Americas entered in February: New York with its first time appearance in the top 10 jumped right behind the inseparable troika Paris-London-Dublin; and Atlanta and Bogotá returned.

Paris 6.68% (1. with 6.60% in January)
London 2.19% (2. with 2.57%)
Dublin 1.37% (3. with 2.09%)
New York 1.22% (22. with 0.56%)
Vienna 1.21% (5. with 1.52%)
Berlin 1.19% (4. with 1.86%)
Warsaw 1.18% (7. with 1.16%)
Zurich 0.99% (6. with 1.39%)
Atlanta 0.81% (120. with 0.15%)
Bogotá 0.74% (15. with 0.65%)

And now to a new section in this monthly reporting: the top visited tournaments on ffindr in February:

Trouble in Vegas 2009 (363 views)
Queen City Tune Up 2009 (202)
Paganello 2009: Alea Iacta Est! (197)
Fogassa 2009 (189)
Windmill Windup Amsterdam 2009 (126)
20th Talampaya Coed & Open Challenge (124)
Bibione 2009 (123)
WD40 Spring Lube 2009 (117)
eXtended European Ultimate Championship Final 2009 (113)
Disco Inferno 2009 (106)

No exciting news concerning development work, things advance as usual. I plan to make a minor update during March, including an improved text area for content submission and a bunch of corrections and ameliorations.

Ultimate Frisbee Tournament 101: Choosing a format

Thu, 26 Feb 09 00:00:00 +0100

An integral part of any Frisbee tournament is its format and schedule. Teams are coming for the game (and maybe the party too), so you better give them what they want. This article is the first in a loose series on how to organise an Ultimate Frisbee tournament, trying to point out the most important aspects of a decent planning. There are quite some resources spread over the Web, most notably the UPA Manual of Championship Series Tournament Formats.

Be sure to know your goals before choosing a format. Does your tournament need to determine a single winner? Does your tournament function as a qualification that needs to promote or relegate teams?

Also be sure to know your constraints. These are normally the number of fields available, which heavily impacts the tournament format choice. Try to calculate the number of games that can be played, since this is usually guiding the choice. You can tweak the number of possible games by setting a time limit and by installing a point cap (be aware that the cap might mess up everything in case of huge comebacks).

The following paragraphs introduce four common formats for Ultimate Frisbee tournaments. It is important to note that most of the times a mixture of these formats are applied.

1. Round robin

A round-robin tournament or all-play-all tournament is a type of group tournament in which each participant plays every other participant an equal number of times.

A classic among Frisbee tournament formats. Any games played within a pool or group fall in this category. This is an excellent mean to prepare the next stage, for instance a single elimination that leads to the finals.

2. Single elimination

A single-elimination tournament, also called a knock-out, cup or sudden death tournament, is a type of elimination tournament where the loser of each match is immediately eliminated from winning the event. This kind of format is commonly applied after some kind of pool play, e.g. for quarterss, semis and finals.

3. Double elimination

A double-elimination tournament is broken into two sets of brackets, the Winner's Bracket and Loser's Bracket. After the first round, the winners proceed into the Winner's Bracket and the losers proceed into the Loser's Bracket. If you lose while in the Loser's Bracket you are eliminated.

I didn't encounter this format in Europe yet, but the Lei-Out successfully applies it for its second day (after an initial round robin / pool games).

4. Swiss system

The principle of a Swiss tournament is that each team will be pitted against another team that has done as well (or as poorly) as itself. This format relies on a sufficient number of fields so that all the matches can be played simultaneously. The first round is either drawn at random or seeded according an initial ranking.

The Windmill Windup in Amsterdam features this innovative format. Team gather Victory Points (VP) based on the point-difference of their games. Ranking all teams regarding their VPs leads to the next match ups: the first plays the second, the third plays the fourth and so on. Corrections are only made to avoid that teams meet twice in the competition. After six of these swiss rounds a single elimination round leads to the final.

Now you have a solid basis of Ultimate Frisbee tournament formats to choose from, let's assume that you picked one (or a combination of several) that suits you best. Now you can start to think about preparing a fair schedule. Consider the following general rules during scheduling:

Every team should get an equal chance to win
Each team should get a good number of games
Teams should be somehow seeded regarding their level

PrintYourBrackets.com is a nice website that helps to actually get the schedule on paper.

There is certainly no perfect format, especially because they mostly rely on an initial seeding. Just don't try to reinvent the wheel, as always it's best to learn from others. Try to find a tournament of the same size and ambitions as yours and look how they solved it. Enjoy your tournament!

A personal Frisbee calendar for everyone

Tue, 17 Feb 09 00:00:00 +0100

Last weekend's update enables now everybody to quickly create a fully customisable Frisbee tournament calendar. To be honest, this feature was one of the main reasons why I started ffindr in the first place. Don't ask me why it took so long (1.5 years) to get there, what counts is that it is now available.

Are you looking for a tournament calendar that states only events that you are interested in? The new ffindr gives you the possibility to configure your custom calendar in no time. What about a perfectly tailored selection of the countless Frisbee events out there? Do you fancy for instance...

Mixed Beach Ultimate in Europe?
Highly competitive Ultimate within 1000 kilometres of London?
Hat tournaments in Asia, although not on artificial turf?
Ultimate in the States for Juniors older than 15 years?
Disc Golf in Europe?

The new tournament page offers Frisbee calendars that can easily be filtered by...

location (by distance, by countries, or by continents), and/or
discipline (Ultimate, disc golf, ...), and/or
format (hat tournament, nationals, ...), and/or
surface (indoor, beach, ...), and/or
division (Open, Mixed, Juniors, ...), and/or
level of play (beginner, advanced, ...).

Just select the criteria you want from the right sidebar, click on apply, and le voilà. To avoid repeating this each time you visit ffindr, you can simply save the selected options (assumed you created an account and are logged in). Saved calendars bring by default a handy RSS feed with it, giving you the possibility to stay tuned and to never miss anything.

All this works thanks to your great support and enthusiastic sharing of information regarding Frisbee tournaments. Adding an event to ffindr is only a matter of minutes. Once added, the information automatically spreads all over the world... for instance via:

ffindr's country tournament calendar
ffindr's continent tournament calendar
the recently published event list (and RSS feed) on ffindr
personalised RSS feeds of hundreds of ffindr users
calendars that rely on ffindr as their data source, e.g. beachultimate.org

Keep on sharing tournaments that happen around you, that you like, or simply that you heard of. Frisbee people will be happy to learn about them and eventually come and play.

New beta online: version 2.1

Sun, 08 Feb 09 00:00:00 +0100

After some struggles with the latest symfony versions, I finally managed to upload and run the latest ffindr version on beta.ffindr.com. The new release includes the following functional enhancements:

the often criticised filter on the find page has finally placed where it belongs: being now fully integrated within the tournament section, custom tournament calendars (including there RSS) can now be created in no time.
the historical find link has been removed from the menu, the search results are now solely accessible via the search box. Historical because this section formed the core of ffindr during its first year.
the tournament categories have been further precised: the divisions got extended (six different Junior divisions can now be distinguished, plus 3 college as well as two elite divisions). And also ultilinks got a new category type: Image gallery.
finally tournament dates can be flagged as tentative dates.

For the technical part, here's what changed on beta:

the project's symfony core has been updated to version 1.2, bringing a wide range of security and speed improvements with it.
the user interface performance has once again been improved, being served with very few HTTP requests (thanks to minifiable jQuery and CSS spriting) resulting in even faster page loads.
the Google Maps are now integrated via the recommended Google API script loader, hopefully leading to even faster map loading. In addition the number of different sized dots representing the amount of upcoming events by country has been reduced to three (before six).

This version also gives you an idea of how pale ffindr looks without your data stuffed into it. I flushed the database to prepare a playground where everything is possible. Create, delete, modify... go ahead and stress the new version a bit to ensure that no nasty problems will appear once on production. Expect the beta version live in about one week if no serious bugs appear.

Being ahead of the planning for the first semester 2009 allows for more time when designing the automated tournament bid submission and approval system and hence a better result. I'm curious myself about the outcome.

State of things and a look at January's access stats

Mon, 02 Feb 09 00:00:00 +0100

Development advances smoothly, the first milestone (jQuery replacing Prototype, upgrading to symfony 1.2) announced in the roadmap will be delivered in time, i.e. mid-February. As usual there'll be a beta version for testing the changes before everything goes live.

Programming unfortunately keeps me from dedicating more time to this blog, there are a few articles that I'd like to write (notably the Frisbee tournament 101). They'll come, just a little later as intended.

Having a look at the visitor statistics confirms the amount of time I spent on this project, December 2008 saw yet another record: ffindr delivered more than 35,000 pages (+2,000 compared to November) to over 9,200 visitors (+2,200) from 104 countries (-2), that's really something. Thanks a lot for adopting this tool and for keeping it alive. This is also your achievement.

For the first time in ffindr's history the United States positions first in the country ranking, overtaking France and Germany. Apparently it was only a matter of time until the country with the most Frisbee players also imposes itself on the access statistics. Switzerland also shows a remarkable performance, advancing from ten to fifth position.

United States 21.02% (3. with 13.26% in December)
France 14.57% (1. with 16.47%)
Germany 12.67% (2. with 13.87%)
United Kingdom 8.54% (4. with 11.00%)
Switzerland 3.43% (10. with 2.40%)
Spain 3.36% (6. with 3.85%)
Italy 3.30% (5. with 4.38%)
Canada 3.25% (-)
Belgium 3.11% (7. with 3.46%)
Ireland 2.43% (-)

Despite the general Americanisation of ffindr's visitors, only European cities occupy the top ten. Zurich, Warsaw, Gent and Barcelona are new, replacing Bogotá, Nantes, Madrid and Oakland.

Paris 6.60% (1. with 7.44% in November)
London 2.57% (2. with 3.54%)
Dublin 2.09% (3. with 1.94%)
Berlin 1.86% (6. with 1.09%)
Vienna 1.52% (4. with 1.81%)
Zurich 1.39%(-)
Warsaw 1.16% (-)
Gent 0.91% (-)
Barcelona 0.83% (-)
Amsterdam 0.80% (7. with 1.03%)

Europe's domination is declining while North America almost doubled its share compared to May 2008. Important to note that there are still more and more Europeans surfing Frisbee on ffindr, it's just that there are even more from the States doing so. Also Asia impressively increased its share by over 350% within the last six months!

Europe 66% (compared to 80% in May 2008)
North America 25% (12.66%)
Asia 3.12% (0.87%)
South America 2.96% (1.51%)
Oceania 1.87% (1.34%)
Africa 0.68% (0.3%)

Stay tuned for the soon-to-be updated ffindr version 2.1.