ffindr.blog! latest news around the frisbee event portal

ffindr becomes Ultilinks... and Ultilinks becomes ffindr!

2008-07-21T00:00:00Z

On the initiative of Patrick from BULA, the domain name Ultilinks.com is now linking to ffindr. The once very popular Ultilinks website has been down since October 2006; it was about time to replace Alan Kay's quote "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." — that decorated the message about the webserver being "currently disabled". Many thanks for the confidence and trust to both Patrick and Ultilinks-creator Peldi!

It's not a secret that Ultilinks — the "mother of all Frisbee related websites" — has been very inspirational for ffindr, and this merger will definitly effect the further development of ffindr. I had the chance to get a little interview with Peldi, the creator of Ultilinks:

How did Ultilinks emerge?

I started Ultilinks in the fall of 1998. At first it was a collection of ultimate-related sites that I had made for myself, and then I noticed that the 2 current lists of links that were there at the time were either not very updated or nowhere near complete. So I set out to become "the ultimate starting point" (that was my tag-line at the time).

Ultilinks was always my side project, and during college I dedicated a lot of time to it. And at some point it was just huge, ask any veteran ultimate player and I bet they'll remember it.

How did the site evolve?

Ultilinks, and Ultimate in general, is how I spent all of my free time, for years. Anything that I thought might be useful to the ultimate community, or just cool, I would add to Ultilinks.

I think 2000 was really the peak of Ultilinks.com - the site had become a big portal with thousands of visitors a day, with a picture-of-the-month, a monthly interview to a prominent ultimate feature, a web-based tournament page creator, tutorials....

After that, around 2001, I took Ultilinks back to its roots, just focusing on links and tournaments.

How about Ultimate and yourself?

I played from 1994 to 2004, and I still occasionally play once in a while. I played mostly in Italy: Bologna and Rimini. I also played in California a bunch, at UCSD for a year and in a few club teams in the Bay Area. Right now I am focusing my energies on getting my very young little software startup off the ground: Balsamiq!

Thanks for your time Peldi, and I promise that ffindr will continuously evolve and continue the great work that Ultilinks did between 1998 and 2006!

Analyzing June's access statistics and a quick glimpse on ffindr 2.0

2008-07-04T00:00:00Z

ffindr users are Frisbee players, that's more than evident when studying the access statistics: mid-weeks the number of visits peek, whereas there's a big calm during the weekends. During June 2008, ffindr recorded 3,500 visits from 74 different countries -- with a total of 11,000 page views. The major statements of May's visitors analysis also apply to the last month, there are only minor changes in the user's geolocation distribution:

Which are the top ffindr countries (in brackets the ranking for May 2008)?

France 30% (1)
Germany 12% (2)
United States 11% (3)
United Kingdom 6.2% (4)
Belgium 5.7% (10)
Spain 4.5% (6)
Canada 3.2% (-)
Italy 3.2% (-)
Austria 2.9% (7)
Poland 2.9% (-)

In which language is ffindr browsed (in brackets the ranking for May 2008)?

English 55% (1)
French 15% (3)
German 11% (2)
Spanish 2.3% (4)
Russian 0.8% (5)

And the top 10 ffindr cities (in brackets the ranking for May 2008)?

Paris 14% (1)
London 2.3% (-)
Gent 2% (-)
Warsaw 1.7% (-)
Berlin 1.5% (8)
Madrid 1.4% (6)
Dublin 1.4% (2)
Vienna 1.3% (4)
Zurich 1.1% (-)
Lisbon 1.1% (7)

One more thing on a different subject though, I currently think about a new version: ffindr 2.0! Basically I want to take advantage of the experience I gained working as a Frontend engineer and Interface Designer. Since I created ffindr's user interface I studied so many good and bad interfaces, providing me with loads of ideas how to simplify the current "all in one" approach. The very powerful event filter on the find page seems to oblige the users more than that it empowers them, providing several pre-filtered subpages (such as a calendar page, a page to search events by keyword, ...) is one solution. We'll see what time brings...

ffindr as an archive of past Frisbee tournaments results

2008-06-30T00:00:00Z

The season is under way, and more and more results are posted on various mailing lists and in varying languages. This is a good lead to recall one of ffindr's major goals: serve as an archive of past events, giving quick access to results.

In order to make this vision come true, ffindr should not only be used before the event takes place to

expose to a highly targeted public, and to
quickly create free tournament websites;

but also afterwards to

give everybody a quick access to tournament results
get listed on the page/RSS feed Recently added results.

Currently a mere quarter (27% to be precise) of ffindr's one-time events (i.e. tournaments) have their results listed. Go ahead and complete events that you once added, or just remember when you add an event next time. I'm considering sending a reminder by e-mail to recall missing tournament results, but that's only an idea for the moment.

Last week I also passed a little bug fix on production: the tabbing on the event pages is now done in fully unobstrusive JavaScript, allowing brand new Firefox 3 to render the page as it should. A quick glimpse at the access statistics of 2008 reveals that ffindr users heavily rely on Mozialla browsers compared to global browser usage:

Firefox 58% -- almost all with FF2 (whereas 40% in general)
Internet Explorer 34% --
20% (26.5%) on the latest version 7, 14% (27.3%) on antiquated IE6
Safari 4.3% (2.4%)
Opera 2.6% (1.5%)

Next week I'll present the most interesting facts of this month's visitor statistics, so see you in July.

ffindr counts 250 registered users

2008-06-20T00:00:00Z

ffindr welcomes the 250th registered user: bommie from Belgium! Roughly speaking, ffindr counts one newly registered user per day since its launch in September 2007. The user's origin underlines ffindr's global approach: the 250 users are spread over 35 countries!

You might wonder why one should create a free account on ffindr, and that's an even more legitimate question since adding new events doesn't require an account anymore.

The answer is simple: it all depends on how you want to use ffindr!

If your sole interest consists of browsing upcoming and past events on the ffindr website, then you're fine with your status as an anonymous user.
But if you want to push it a little further and you're eager to play with some of the possibilites that the Internet offers, then you might want to quickly sign up for a free ffindr account.

Once registered and logged in, you can:

automatically become the owner of the events you added, which entitles you to modify all the data -- whenever, wherever;
save your prefered filter settings on the find page to avoid resetting them on your next visit;
create personalised RSS feeds to stay up to date in an automated manner, such as a feed that announces all Goaltimate beach tournaments in South American;
mark events as your favourites to boost their ranking on ffindr's (popular events ranking)[en/popular];
provide perfectly adapted Frisbee calendar information for the visitors on your website, just like beachultimate.org did;
become a moderator of a certain region or country, which entitles you to modify any event and thus helping to guarantee ffindr's high quality of Frisbee event data.

Go for it and create your free ffindr! now, all we ask for is a nickname, your e-mail address and a password.

ffindr supports French eco label for Frisbee tournaments

2008-06-19T00:00:00Z

Also the Frisbee world follows the global trend of an ever increasing environmental awareness: Frisbee club Olympique Ultimate Frisbee Tours (OUF) from the centre of France recently launched an eco label called frisbeEco. Events that follow the valuable advices of their Charte are now labeled on ffindr with the frisbeECO logo, just like this year's edition of the Open de Touraine -- the tournament where this eco movement started four years ago. Don't hesitate to check the frisbeECO website for valuable advices and directives that help to

firstly avoid garbage and
secondly to separate and recycle it as good as possible.

A little side note: searching Google for the term frisbee shows on position 93 the community-driven Frisbee tournament calendar and archive ffindr. There's still some potential, just like the two search terms frisbee event: where the top result is ffindr!

So what happens in June?

2008-06-10T00:00:00Z

Summer finally arrived in Europe, with it comes the Ultimate Frisbee season. The 4th Windmill Windup in Amsterdam is going to happen next weekend, shortly after the legendary Boston Invite, then the huge Potlach, and not to forget the season's highlight: the World Ultimate Championships in Vancouver.

I'm currently working on the planning of our little one-day Hat tournament in Paris, which underlines once more my desire for an automatic subscription process on ffindr. This would be particularly useful for Hat tournaments, where a big number of players sign up individually. An automated calculation of teams of equal strengths could be performed by ffindr, based on the level each player assigned to him/herself... thus relieving tournament directors from a huge organisational effort.

Moving from the fields to the web... there's a new website you might not know yet: Ultiscanner.net from Barcelona-based Roger van Swaay. This very Web 2.0 project just implemented an automatic ffindr-powered synchronisation of their tournament data. The site provides a set of tools which help teams collect interest from their players concerning tournament attendance. Whenever an event is now added on ffindr, it will be automatically communicated to ultiscanner.net -- yet another convincing argument to promote your event on ffindr. I particularly like the world map of Frisbee tournaments on ultiscanner, only possible thanks to your geocoding efforts every time you add a tournament on ffindr.

In the meanwhile ffindr proves to work smoothly: a steadily growing user base taking care of an ever increasing number of events. Enjoy summer, enjoy Frisbee, and keep yourself up to date with ffindr.

Digging into last month's access statistics

2008-06-01T00:00:00Z

It's a new month, and it's time for a little excursion to ffindr's access statistics of May 2008.

Since it's start in September 2007, the traffic coming to ffindr is has increased steadily. ffindr served almost 12.000 pages to nearly 3.000 visitors -- compared to 3.700 pages and 600 visitors during ffindr's first month. The average ffindr user is 29 years old, wears black glasses and loves pasta... just kidding, I won't go this much into details (although I surely could ;)

The top searched keyword bringing people to ffindr happened to be the world's biggest Frisbee beach party paganello. The usage of ffindr regarding the five available languages is as follows:

English 55%
German 20%
French 12%
Spanish 4%
Russian 3%

ffindr proves to be a true global Frisbee event service, having attracted visitors from all continents. This definitely sounds great, but diving into details reveals that visits regarding continents are still unbalanced:

Visits from Europe make up 80% of ffindr's traffic,
whereas requests from the Americas (North and South) account for 15%,
with Oceania (1,5%), Asia (~1%) and Africa (.3%) being far behind.

Looking at country level clearly shows that ffindr has been adopted especially by European countries:

France 25%
Germany 19%
United States 11%
United Kingdom 5%
Switzerland 4%
Spain 4%
Austria 3.5%
Russia 3.5%
Ireland 3.5%
Belgium 3%

And also the following data might not tell a lot, here are the world's top 10 ffindr cities:

Paris 11.61%
Dublin 2.92%
St Petersburg 1.68%
Vienna 1.48%
Moscow 1.24%
Madrid 1.21%
Lisbon 1.17%
Berlin 1.07%
Prague 1.04%
Nantes 0.87%

Did I forget something? Anyway, have a nice month!

Collaboration with BULA

2008-05-28T00:00:00Z

ffindr is happy to announce its first big partnership in the Frisbee circus: beachultimate.org aka BULA now relies for their world beach ultimate calendar on ffindr! Have a look at the BULA blog talking about this new collaboration: Ffindr: what a great service!

To make this special partnership happen, ffindr implemented a BULA administrator functionality that enables sanctioning of ffindr events. You might have noticed that some events show the BULA logo next to there name. These events have been sanctioned by Patrick as official BULA tournaments. Thanks for the confidence in community powered and maintained data, Patrick. I'm sure many will follow your example, it makes things just so much easier for Frisbee webmaster.

And there's already a second website featuring a Frisbee calendar powered by ffindr: the Beach Ultimate Group Portugal also integrated ffindr's Frisbee event data into their homepage. If you're also interested in shifting the troublesome task of maintaining your Frisbee event planner to a third party, have a look at the post How to integrate ffindr's Frisbee event data in your website! The ffindr community will be happy to help you out, certainly for free.

How to integrate ffindr's Frisbee event data in your website

2008-05-24T00:00:00Z

Recently I wrote about how ffindr relies on the community to get high quality Frisbee event data, I now like to write about how the community can rely on ffindr to get high quality Frisbee event data onto their websites.

From the very beginning on ffindr was designed to:

enable gathering of Frisbee event information with the help of many contributors, and to
offer an easy-to-use Web interface to give the data back to the users, as well as to
provide a way to export data for integration on remote websites.

The first two points have proved to be very successful, and the third is getting more and more traction. If you're a webmaster of a Frisbee website -- either of a small team or a big association -- you certainly have been confronted with the cumbersome task of keeping your Frisbee tournament listing / calendar up to date. Tournaments need to be added, dates have to be changed; in short you have a tremendous amount of work just for this one page.

ffindr offers a convenient way to automatically take care of all this, in two simple steps:

Just create a personalised RSS feed with any filtering applied that suit your needs, for instance all beach Ultimate tournaments for mixed teams within 2000 kilometers of Milan, or Europe's 2008 national Frisbee championships.
Then integrate the RSS feed with the Frisbee events you or your visitors are interested on your website. This can be accomplished either by a standard RSS plugin of your content management system or with an RSS feed parser that allows you full access to all the information retrieved from ffindr.

I prepared a little tutorial that shows how to integrate ffindr powered data on a remote website with PHP. The file how_to_add_ffindr_rss.zip contains all you need to understand how it works and to get a calendar like this one. Once you reproduced the same result on your server, you can adapt and style the information after your fancy, it's just like the data would come from your database.

Delivered from the ffindr server, high quality Frisbee event data will then automatically fly into your website. Now you can stop worrying about your calendar and start working on your fitness, your throws or whatever else you want to do with the additional spare time you'll get.

Discussing feature requests: what should be integrated next?

2008-05-19T00:00:00Z

Every now and then I get some insightful mails with ideas to improve ffindr. I thought that this blog is the perfect place to present and discuss those with you -- the actual users of ffindr. So feel invited to leave a comment including your preferences about what functionality you want to see next, and/or what feature you think is totally useless.

This post was triggered by Justin from Madrid, who wrote a long and interesting mail containing the following paragraph:

"I've been thinking about the site a little bit recently, and I was wondering if you might consider a few additions. Namely, some user input into the tournaments. Perhaps it can be moderated by the event owner, but a comments section for a tournament would give people a chance to hype their teams, make predictions, reflect on the history. And, even more interesting in my opinion, maybe a link roll section, where people can put up links to sites related to the tournament - specifically, I'd like to see this section used for people to share the photos from the tournaments. Every tournament, especially in the later rounds, I see tons and tons of cameras on the sidelines, but only rarely to the tournament web sites stay alive long enough after the tournament to share the pictures, and very few TDs request photos. If people could put their own links on ffindr for tournaments, we'd all have a better chance to bask in personal glory. Other links could be write-ups, tournaments that we discussed in the circle after games, newspaper articles, videos, etc."

What do you think about this, would people use this feature? Technically this is no big thing at all, I could quickly release event commenting. To minimise work of event "owners" and moderators, I propose to offer the comment functionality only as an add-on and not by default when events are created.
There's another request popping up frequently: several users would like to see an automated subscription process for tournaments, just like ultilinks did. To be honest I thought about this already before starting ffindr, so it would be quite a logical next step. The big question is: when to do this next step? Regarding development, this task is quite a heavy one. Thus this could take a while since I'm developing ffindr only in my spare time. On the other hand, this would relief many tournament directors from a troublesome job. Once this add-on is enabled, ffindr could offer an online subscription of teams, managing a subscription and waiting list that keeps everybody up to date via notification mails. What do you think, is the community ready for such a service? Would tournament directors switch to a third party (ffindr) subscription system rather then developing their own on their tournament website or handling all this via email?
Last but not least I'm considering the integration of a simple map including markers for each Frisbee events. I'm not quite sure about the usefulness of this, but it definitely would be a nice eye candy. The reasons why I haven't put this up are simple: I don't know yet how to do it best. Currently I consider adding this frisbeefied Google Map on the "find" page below the results, thus showing only a map with the markers of the events above. What do you reckon?

I'm curious about your point of view, please let me know either by email at contact@ or simply by commenting this post.

i18n (= internationalisation) of ffindr (= Frisbee finder)

2008-05-15T00:00:00Z

Being a web application, ffindr is available to everybody all over the world, all the time. This sounds sweet, but it's not enough to really address oneself to everybody. Although the Frisbee world is pretty Anglophone, it's not nice to exclude those who don't speak English. And since this application wants to be nice to everybody (i.e. nice to watch, nice to use, nice to have... just nice), ffindr is available in several languages.

Currently we have 5 languages: English, German, French, Russian and Spanish (ordered by completed translations) Big thanks at this point to

David Rosenfeld from Ireland for his corrections of the English version,
Charles Gleïzes and Christophes Brolles for straighten the French translation,
Sasha (Oleksandr Stakhovsky) from Kiev for doing the translation into Cyrillic signs (sorry but sign's all I can make of it, beautiful signs by the way), and
Mariana Otero from Maracaibo and José Antonio de los Rios from Madrid for their work on the Spanish version.

Work on two more languages has started (Polish and Italian), and why not having ffindr in your language? I invite you to join the team (either as a translator of whole parts of ffindr, or as a corrector that checks existing work), it's not about endless efforts of only a few but, about a small contribution of many that will make the difference. Thanks to the community, ffindr became what it is: a huge source of Frisbee event information. And there's still a long way to go/continue.

How it works

If you don't want to get lost in translation, just read on to see that it's pretty straight forward to translate ffindr.

Basically there are two different things to translate: firstly the interface (like all the buttons, labels, descriptions) and second the static pages (like the about, spread the word and all the other pages available in the footer). Thanks to a clean separation of content and code, there's one file that holds all the interface translation (a XML file called messages.[COUNTRY_CODE].xml), and another for each static page (a simple text file called about_[COUNTRY_CODE].txt for instance).

The first, the country specific XML file, is composed of a bunch of source / target pairs. Only the value inside the target brackets has to be translated, the rest can be ignored.

Example of interface file

An example taken from messages.en.xml of the current ffindr homepage in English...

<trans-unit>
<source>event/welcomeSuccess.php-teaser1-body1</source>
<target>discover frisbee events world-wide</target>
</trans-unit>

...looks in the Spanish file messages.es.xml like this:

<trans-unit>
<source>event/welcomeSuccess.php-teaser1-body1</source>
<target>descubrir eventos de Frisbee a nivel mundial</target>
</trans-unit>

Since the content of this interface XML file is quite basic, it's the number of targets to translate -- currently 420 messages -- that makes it quite a task. Fortunately many of the short messages repeat themselves, so it's actually not this much.

Example of static page

The second part of translating ffindr concerns the static pages filled with whole sentences and paragraphs. An example from the help page in English...

## 2. <a name="why_ffindr"></a>Why should I use ffindr?
ffindr is geared towards players and organisers alike.

...will look in Russian as follows:

## 2. <a name="why_ffindr"></a>Зачем пользоваться ffindr?</h2> ffindr полезен как игрокам так и организаторам.

All the text inside the text files has been translated while the basic formatting (HTML tags, Markdown formatting) is left untouched. There's nothing more to add I guess, it's all about translating the whole text of each of the static page files into the new language.

Download the source files

Each of the following language packages contains the interface XML (messages.xml) plus four static text files (about.txt for about.txt, help.txt for help, spreadTheWord.txt for spread the word, and contact.txt for contact).

English: ffindr_i18n_en.zip
German: ffindr_i18n_de.zip
French: ffindr_i18n_fr.zip
Russian: ffindr_i18n_ru.zip
Spanish: ffindr_i18n_es.zip
Polish: ffindr_i18n_pl.zip

Just download the zipped packages to...

get an idea of what to translate before starting
correct spelling errors or complicated, meaningless sentences
get started with the translation of ffindr into your language
steal a set of translated interface messages for other use

Hopefully with this little tutorial, you should now be well on your way to unlocking the mystery of ffindr's internationalisation, I mean the i18n..

How ffindr gets feeded with event data, theory and practise

2008-05-10T00:00:00Z

ffindr is a web 2.0 tool, meaning that it is collaborative. The content's quality, i.e. information about Frisbee events, depends entirely on the community. And you are the community!

A few days ago I removed the necessity of being registered and logged into ffindr to add events. The fact to add events anonymously certainly facilitates sharing of Frisbee event information, but this also has its prize:

more work for the moderators who need to check the provided data for consistency
no possibility to modify the information once the event has been added (you can always claim the ownership of your event later on, but this demands an e-mail and a reaction from a moderator)
the site might become a target of spamming with bulk data, leading to a polluted database and/or even temporary downtime.

We'll see how this experiment evolves, feel free to express your opinion to guide me to the best possible solution.

Talking about moderators, here are some quick facts and aspects of this particular ffindr job. Moderators are users with special power: more precisely they have the ability to modify/delete any event listed on ffindr (normally each user has these rights only for events he or she contributed). Moderators keep the content tidy and add/revise events of a certain region on a regular basis.

At this point I'd like to thank Erik Felgner from Erlangen who does exactly this for Germany. It would be nice to win some more people to cover more countries, leading to more accurate data and especially many more events. Be reminded that everybody can become a moderator, just ask and we'll see. Currently we cover Europe and especially Germany and France pretty well, I'd love to see more information coming from Frisbee hotspots like Northern America, Japan and Australia.

To conclude this post I'd like to quote a Wikipedia quote of a nice and concise definition of what ffindr and all web 2.0ish applications are all about:

"…the philosophy of mutually maximising collective intelligence and added value for each participant by formalised and dynamic information sharing and creation."

New blog to improve the flow of information

2008-05-08T00:00:00Z

Being a real web application from the outset, ffindr is subject to constant improvements and changes. A blog hasn't been priority for many month, but finally it's up and running: Welcome everybody!

I mainly want to use this blog as a channel to

give this application a more personal touch by writing about less formal things than events as well as about people who regularly contribute
announce and explain recently introduced features, as well as presenting existing features in depth
shift the frequent e-mail discussions regarding feature requests and enhancements to the public to increase transparency and participation
provide helpful advices about the powerful (yet too often hidden) functionalities of ffindr.

ffindr grows steadily -- regarding content, functions, visits -- and most of the time the changes are triggered by input from the community. I want this blog to become an exchange of ideas around ffindr's aim to improve the announcement, presentation, and archiving of Frisbee event information. I invite you to share and discuss your point of view, ideas, critics, questions, etc.