It's now exactly one year ago that ffindr went online, one year of spreading and aggregating of Frisbee tournament information. All started around June 2007, when a small idea evolved into something bigger: some specifications of a community-based tournament calender. In August the open source platform symfony came into play, and about a month later the project with the codename ffindr went live: as ffindr.com!

In the last 12 months, ffindr accumulated 766 events -- shared and updated by roughly 300 registered people. The project is truly global, with listed events from 59 different countries. Here's are the top 20 country regarding where ffindr events are located:

1. Germany 153 events
2. France 143
3. United Kingdom 79
4. United States 76
5. Italy 26
6. Belgium 25
7. Australia 21
8. Switzerland 21
9. Canada 19
10. Spain 17
11. Austria 14
12. Netherlands 13
13. Czech Republic 10
14. Philippines 9
15. Poland 9
16. Portugal 9
17. Sweden 9
18. Venezuela 9
19. New Zealand 7
20. Ireland 7

ffindr counts almost 300 registered users. Once a logged user creates an event on ffindr, he/she becomes its owner. This entitles him to perform any modifications to his/her events. Besides the users there is a bunch of moderators who have the right to modify any event on ffindr, without being explicitly its owner.

The bulk of the data has been added by the admin (that's me). The high number of contributed events can also be explained by the fact that the ownership of "events added as anonymous" is quickly claimed by this greedy admin. In the following the top 15 users regarding their event contribution on ffindr:

1. christian 521 contributed events (user since 11 September 2007)
2. efelgner 45 (24 October 2007)
3. bulabula 15 (2 March 2008)
4. Marvin 9 (3 October 2007)
5. flogru 6 (30 October 2007)
6. Luluboy 3 (31 March 2008)
7. flogru 3 (17 September 2007)
8. cardinal 3 (21 November 2007)
9. gaddoz 3 (6 May 2008)
10. bartakaseco 3 (27 September 2007)
11. ruliano 3 (4 March 2008)
12. bastrapp 3 (15 October 2007)
13. hovsky 3 (30 October 2007)
14. cadas666 3 (10 March 2008)
15. lukehillson 3 (8 January 2008)

In the following some statistics of the first year, from September 17, 2007 until today (September 16, 2008) to be precise.

• 104,381 total page views

  • that's an average of 285 daily page views
  • busiest day has been the 9 April 2008 with 1,231 page views

• 27,603 total visits

  • that makes 75 visits per day
  • a record of 351 visitors showed up on 26 August 2008

Visitors came from impressive 126 different countries! Most of the ffindr users come from Europe (79%), followed by the Americas (17%). Only a minor number of visits comes from Asia (2.1%) and Oceania (1.3%), with Africa (0.3%) far behind.

Unsurprisingly there's a strong correlation between the event location ranking (see above) and the origin of visitors. Here are the top 15 countries regarding visitors:

1. France 25%
2. Germany 16%
3. United States 12%
4. United Kingdom 6%
5. Belgium 3.4%
6. Spain 3.4%
7. Switzerland 3.3%
8. Austria 3.1%
9. Poland 3.1%
10. Ireland 3%
11. Canada 2.6%
12. Italy 2.6%
13. Netherlands 1.9%
14. Russia 1.5%
15. Czech Republic 1.1%

Almost half of ffindr's traffic comes through referring sites (42%). Traffic sent by search engine accounts for 35% of the total. 23% of the visitors come directly to ffindr, that is by typing ffindr.com in their browser. English (37%) is first choice regarding the language settings on ffindr, followed by German (8%), French (7%), Spanish (1.4%) and Russian (0.8%).

And finally here are the top 15 ffindr cities, i.e. the origin of the ffindr users by city:

1. Paris 11.7%
2. Dublin 1.7%
3. Vienna 1.6%
4. London 2.2%
5. Berlin 1.4%
6. Madrid 1%
7. Warsaw 1%
8. Dublin 0.7%
9. Nantes 0.7%
10. Toulouse 0.7%
11. Prague 0.6%
12. St Petersburg 0.6%
13. Erlangen 0.6%
14. Bruxelles 0.6%
15. Amsterdam 0.6%

To conclude this detailed look at the access statistic, I'd like to announce a challenging goal for ffindr's second anniversary: having the same statistics of the whole first year for one single month! We'll see what ffindr's second year will bring...

In the meanwhile work on the second version of ffindr is rapidly advancing. The usability will be widely enhanced to allow for easier browsing of the huge amount of data. In addition, some new features will top the new ffindr off:

• an ultilink-style Frisbee link list covering the whole globe
• a global search for events / links with result suggestions (autocomplete)
• an interactive Frisbee map on the homepage
• upgrade to symfony 1.1, the underlying MVC framework
• more efficient programming resulting in faster download times

There hasn't been a release date fixed yet, but the transition to ffindr-2.0 will happen in the near future. This blog will keep you in the loop...