New system

Global FlyFisher is an old web site. The main stock of the pages are plain HTML-documents, which we have edited manually during our many years in the trade.

Lately it has become worse and worse to update the site and keep all the pages in sync. Older pages have had a tendency to be lost in the system. If one of us did not get the link included in an update, the page would literally be lost in the huge pile of old pages on the site. And even worse … no links to a page means that it is lost to the search engines too, and hence will not be found … ever.
We have long planned on adding some kind of automation to the system. This would aide us in maintaining the site and give you a lot better chances of finding what you want.
Now we have done it!

What you get

• Main page and section front pages that always show the latest relevant articles

• A site map for you to see all section front pages and article entry pages. A few article sub pages are in the map too, but only where it is relevant
• Archives for all sections, meaning that older articles will no longer disappear out of sight - yours and, sometimes, ours. These pages can be sorted by date and by article title
• A keyword section that allows you to browse pages by subject rather than by section

What we did

• Created a database that contains information about all pages -- abstract, dates, thumbprint, colors and other things

• Freed ourselves of the huge task of adding all new articles manually to all the relevant front pages, shifting the content of the page and letting the oldest article sift out - and sometimes into oblivion.
• Added publishing dates to articles, allowing us to better control when articles are due to be published
• Added keywords to the articles, thus indexing them in an extra dimension apart from the section categories

The real revolution

The really new thing - apart from pages that reflect actual content - is the keyword system. The keywords allow you to gather articles across sections about a specific subject or in a specific context.
A good example is all pages relevant to the subject "fly lines", which might hide in both the Fish Better and the Reviews section -- not to mention older articles in the Staff section. Another example might be articles relevant to pike fishing which will consist of fly patterns, Fish Better, reports, Gallery entries and maybe the odd review.
Such articles were impossible to find before, but are now accessible through the keywords page, where you can choose one or more keywords and combine your own page of articles about your subject(s) only.

Do this by clicking a single keyword link on the keyword page, or check more than one word and select whether to search for all words (AND them) or search for any word (with OR).

What then?

Now remains for us to publish new articles, and the upcoming winter you will probably see a lot more articles than you have the last year or so. Job changes, family growth and much more has taken our time, and kept us from writing as much as we wanted on GFF.
That is going to change now!