All articles from section

I have made a few series of articles over the years. They now have their own page

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

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

Some of you may have noticed that it’s been awfully quiet here lately. Covid was here…

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.

So, the Global FlyFisher’s video section just passed 10,000 videos. And suitably enough the 10K mark was a Davie McPhail video showing how to tie a muddler.

The number of videos on the Global FlyFisher video page is steadily closing in on 10,000!

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.

The Global FlyFisher has long been on various social media, and is now on Instagram too

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

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.

The Global FlyFisher has been on Pinterest for a while, and get quite a bit of attention there.

A site as GFF needs some level of caching in order to be able to deliver pages fast without bogging down the server or database

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?

It seems to me that success in fly fishing, fly tying, guiding, writing or filming as well as social media can be secured by simply being a young and reasonably good looking woman

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

We pride ourselves on many and good images. A lot of other people also like our images... some a little too much, actually!

Looking back at 2014. The most popular articles and pages on the Global FlyFisher the past year looks much as it always does... with a few changes.

The Global FlyFisher has just gone through one of the largest changes ever, and the money is rolling in... sort of

We started accepting banner ads... and we stopped again.

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

A graphical overview over the twenty most visited sections on The Global FlyFisher in 2013.

A graphical overview over the twenty most visited sections on The Global FlyFisher in 2013.

We have used an image of earth shot from space in our logo for 20 years. The picture has a fascinating 40 year story

It's become kind of a tradition for me to do these yearly status posts when we get close to Christmas and New Year. So how was 2013 on GFF?

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

It has been a while since I did a Merry Christmas post on GFF, so I thought I'd make one this year. A few pictures from this year and a handful from earlier.

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 have presented the online magazines before on our blog, but the number of Flash/PDF-based online fishing magazines seems to be steadily growing (if not exploding!), and I wanted to return to this phenomenon.

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!

An approach from a business that wanted to buy The Global FlyFisher made me wonder: what's a site like this worth? And don't worry... we didn't sell!

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.

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

New articles, new front page, new facilities. GFF's heart is beating steadily.

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.

But we're out of the coma now!

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 Global FlyFisher can now be found on Twitter.

You can now follow The Global FlyFisher on Twitter

Things are coming into gear on the new GFF server

A short intro the the concept of the Global FlyFisher and the people behind the site.

Our forum has never been the busiest place on The Global FlyFisher. For some reason our rather large crowd of visitors have never selected us to be their prime place to talk about things.

And we have chosen to let that be as it was... for a long time. But one of our contributors—Chris del Plato—has been nagging me for a while to get something better, and the topic has been on the agenda a few times lately. So under a mild pressure from him, the partners and several others, I started looking into a new forum system.

We have used the same forum system for a long time

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.

We don't do reciprocal SEO links. This is not meant to deliver a snobbish attitude towards fellow publishers who are as proud of their work as we are. We just prefer providing good, original content rather than linking back and forth.

This site consists entirely of copyrighted work and is published for personal use and enjoyment. From time-to-time we notice work from this site used in unauthorized manners.

The Global FlyFisher is fully non-commercial and does not sell or exchange advertising space.

One of the most popular parts of our site is the Reviews section. A good mixture of product and literature reviews are a heathly addition to a global site such as ours.

Submit a comment to anything on Global FlyFisher

How we rate stuff in our reviews