It’s been a year like so many others. GFF is chugging along, doing as good as ever ... and even with new content!
A mail from China
One of the great things about running this site is all the contacts it produces.
Just a few days ago I got a mail from a Chinese GFF-visitor.
I knew we had Chinese anglers coming in now and then, but this is the first mail I've had from one.
木石 - or Cliff Lee as he kindly "translated" it for me - wanted to sign up, and also sent me the images shown below of some beautifully tied flies.
When 2025 turns to 2026 the oldest article on GFF will be 32 years old! Yes, really. Three decades and a bit is the time that has passed since these photos were available online for the first time – and they are still there, together with tonnes of other content, which has been published over the years.
The infancy
Sure the photos are small, sure they are in fairly poor quality and sure it's not big art. Back then it was analog cameras and flatbed scanners. The first commercial digital cameras had been just a glimpse in the eyes of a Kodak employee the previous years, and digitizing things was in its infancy.
This site – or rather its predecessor(s) – was in an equal infancy, and back then I was just fooling around with this new technology, publishing stuff on a very immature Internet, and not thinking much of it other than having some fun and learning some new things about this concept called the World Wide Web.
I had no idea that I would be sitting here today, closing in on retirement, still maintaining the same fly fishing web site, and having 30+ years worth of content, counting thousands of articles, blog posts, reviews, pictures, videos and much more.
Never better
The site has never been better than it is now.
The quality of the content is better than ever, there's more of it than there has ever been, and it's better organized and easier to find than ever before.
The technology is mature, the server is suitably fast, and everything is playing ... except the number of visitors.
Don't get me wrong! There's still plenty of visitors, Thousands every day. But compared to just 10 years ago, the numbers are a fraction of what they used to be. I have moaned about this before: social media and all kinds of snazzy apps are sucking life out of “real websites" like this one.
In the case of GFF it doesn't matter much, because the site isn't depending on visitor numbers to exist. Of course it needs visitors to justify its existence, but it's not depending on ad clicks or affiliate links, and as such not relying on traffic to keep running.
The economy
The economy on the site is secured by a lot of generous donors, who pay monthly or a single or a couple of times, and fill up the PayPal-account that pays for the hosting, which is the single largest expense on the site.
I have said it before and say it again: your contributions are so appreciated, and even though I'd probably keep paying myself, even if you weren't there, it makes a huge difference to get your contributions, and to know that you appreciate the site enough to be willing to pay for it.
And that doesn't mean that the rest of you aren't welcome if you don't pay.
You are!
The site is exactly the same to paying and non-paying visitors, and no one is frowned upon for not paying.
Should you want to add a bit to the GFF bank account, you are of course welcome.
If not, you are equally welcome.
2025 in retrospect
So ... 2025 ... what happened?
Same, same I'm tempted to write. Things are getting published, and this year hasn't been the worst when it comes to publishing frequency – in spite of me wanting even more contributions.
32 new articles were published since New Year's Evening 2024. One about every 1½ weeks. Not the worst year ever. We've had a few years with 20-or-so articles. On the other hand we've also had a year with 556!
Add to that 10 blog entries, 4 reviews, almost 500 videos and much more, and it's been a decent year with stuff being published in a non-embarrassing rate.
This has not least been thanks to UK fly tyer Nick Thomas who has been a generous and regular contributor with his always excellent fly patterns. He is responsible for close to half of this year's harvest of articles and thanks for that, Nick!
Most read
I have done lists of the most read articles and most used pages in the past (2016, 2014, 2013, 2010), but I'm not really counting anymore. The statistics system that used to count the visits and analyze the traffic has been abandoned. Google Analytics is way too nosy for my taste, and I have no interest in letting them snoop around in the users' data on this site. They know way too much already.
But I still know what's popular, because that only changes rarely. In order, the top 10 pages on the site were at the beginning of 2025:
- LeaderCalc
- Classic Wet Flies
- First setup
- Fishing a bubble
- Fly Tying Thread Table
- Leader formulas
- Shark's Caddis Larva
- Shooting heads
- Flexible bench
- Flyline Maintenance 101
That probably hasn't changed since, and it actually hasn't changed much for years. These pages have been consistently popular for as long as they have existed, which in some cases is a couple of decades.
The future
And, you may ask, what does the future bring on GFF?
Well, I may say: basically more of the same ...
It may sound boring and somewhat repetitive, but it isn't. It's fun to add new functions to the site, create pattern articles, make image galleries and read books to review.
It's simply fun to keep on publishing stuff that gets a life online, and is appreciated by visitors. I like doing it and you, the audience, still seems to enjoy it – even though you are fewer than you used to be.
What the future won't bring is more Instagram, Facebook or other Social Media posts.
I'm very quiet on these platforms these days, and I'm seriously considering abandoning all the sites and canceling the accounts.
I get very little interesting stuff through the SoMe-channels, and have to engage in all kinds of voodoo, spam filtering and ad blocking to get something that's just barely tolerable.
I want to see what real fishing friends are up to, what flies they have tied, where they have traveled, and what they have caught and experienced in relation to fly fishing.
The SoMe tech giants feed me AI slop showing irrelevant content from people I don't know (some that even don't exist), companies I'm not interested in – and of course from a lot more or less real women with definitely fake attributes ... and that goes for the real ones as well as the AI generated ones.
I have about had enough of that.
We'll see where my frustration brings me on that matter.
GFF will go on
I'm retiring next year, and I'm sure that will give me more time to produce GFF-content.
I'm so looking forward to that!
I've been under a deadline-regime for most of my adult life, making my living as a journalist, as a freelance writer, as an editor-in-chief and in the latest couple of decades as a web developer, making web sites for clients. This has meant that there has been an almost constant row of dates where stuff has had to be finished and ready.
It's not the same with GFF. On this site, I'm the one who sets the deadlines, and in general there are none! If there is, it's me who have set them, and that makes them way more acceptable.
So it's Happy New Year from the Global FlyFisher – and should you want to share something with other anglers around the globe, there's plenty room here. Just drop me a mail at martin@globalflyfisher.com. You can also read more about contributing content here.
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