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Web Reports

tinyurl.com/ficcreport

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It is intended to write quarterly update reports for the Journal starting with the July 2016 issue (v24n3). To make web links easier to follow, there will be a short URL link (see heading) to this page and each report will be show below with active links. Links quoted in other articles in that issue may also be given. The QR code links to this page and may be used in the printed Journal to make accessing this page easier.

May 2021 - Feb 2021 - Nov 2020 - Aug 2020 - May 2020 - February 2020 - November 2019 - August 2019 - May 2019 - February 2019 - November 2018 - August 2018 - May 2018 - February 2018 - October 2017 - July 2017 - April 2017 - January 2017 - October 2016 - July 2016 - April 2016 - November 2016 -


Draft Notes

[October 2021] reports will be annual from now on in the new year's v2.


for v29n4 Nov 21 - Jan 22

 

FICC web report written 5th September for the November 2021 edition

This report covers the six months to September 2021. As has been the case throughout the year, we are averaging around 15 visitors to the web site each day, and the number of site pages viewed is holding steady at about 100 daily. Most of the visitors are from, in descending order, the US, Japan, GB, China and Canada, and that has been the sequence since Japan zoomed up the chart from nowhere to 2nd place in 2018. First visitors for the period were from Bolivia, Macau and Samoa, although there have been no new countries since June.


No report for V29n3, I'm not sure why.


for v29n2 May 2021

 

FICC web report written 6th April for the May 2021 edition

This article is available online at tinyurl.com/ficcreport.

The average number of visitors to the website has been consistent, in the mid-teens, for the past 12 months, but the number of web pages viewed by those visitors suddenly doubled in January and February to over 200. During March the page views settled back down again to the low 100s. This is probably influenced by Kurt's tweets.

We have three new flags, with single visits from Malawi in December, New Caledonia in February and Tonga in March.

Visitor activity, 3 months to 1st April 2021

for v29n1 Feb 2021

 

FICC web report, 9th December for February 2021

This article is available online at tinyurl.com/ficcreport.

There is little to report in the last quarter with average daily visits rising to 19 and daily page views to 114. As this is being written in December 2020, I can offer a report on the year in which we have had almost 5,000 visitors (an increase of around 1,000 on 2019) and 38,000 page views (27,000 in 2019).
The total of countries now stands at 130, Mauritius the new addition. There were 11 new countries in 2020, 19 in 2019 - this will presumably continue to diminish as visitors from new countries are increasingly difficult to attract. We are still missing 111 countries according to Flag Counter, ranging from Afghanistan to Zambia (the same two countries I cited in May 2019 when we were 138 short).


for v28n4 Nov 2020

 

FICC web report, 27th September for November 2020

This article is available online at tinyurl.com/ficcreport.

Visitor numbers to the FICC website have stabilised at higher levels after the addition of Kurt's twitter feed. The 30-day average currently stands at 16 visitors per day viewing 89 pages. The list of visiting countries now totals 129, with Kuwait and Qatar the latest.


for v28n3 Aug 2020

 

FICC web report, 23rd June for August 2020

This article is available online at tinyurl.com/ficcreport.

The site has had a refresh, following an initiative by Kurt Streepy (ficc #18). The home page has been simplified, the unused chat group removed, the colour scheme toned down and Kurt's frequent tweets on @First_Stamps are now embedded.
Kurt's efforts have resulted in a rise activity on the site which reached a new high of 71 visitors on 26th April, 47 of whom were from India. We are currently averaging 14 daily visitors looking at 138 site pages (9 and 38 respectively in the last report).
Members are encouraged to follow @First_Stamps on Twitter. [TIM - this line might be superfluous if it is already in the editorial or elsewhere.]

Our list of visitors now includes Aruba, Seychelles and Mongolia.


for v28n2 May 2020

 

FICC web report, March 2020

This article is available online at tinyurl.com/ficcreport.

Web traffic  
Visitor numbers and page views have both dropped significantly in recent months and the averages now stand at 9 visitors and 38 page views each day. In January we passed the milestone of 10,000 visitors since the current count began in July 2016 (as explained previously, repeat visits from the same device in the same week are not counted).

The list of countries logging in has extended to 124, now more than half of the total of 241. New visitors have come from Albania, Jordan, Moldova and Trinidad & Tobago.


for v28n1 February 2020

 

FICC web report, November 2019

This article is available online at tinyurl.com/ficcreport. Type the address into your browser and the online version has all the links in place, so from there you can just click.

Web traffic  
Site visits have increased in the last few months with an average of 12 daily visitors and average daily page views at 75.

We have had visits from Palestine, Burma, Barbados and Yemen, bringing the country total to 119 - nearly half the total of 241 recognised by our logging service.


for v27n4 November 2019

 

FICC web report, November 2019

This article is available online at tinyurl.com/ficcreport. Type the address into your browser and the online version has all the links in place, so from there you can just click.

Web traffic  
This continued to slow for the last quarter. Average daily visitor numbers now stand at 10, and average daily page views at 38.

We have had visits from Cyprus, El Salvador and Brunei, bringin the country total to 112, out of a possible 241.


for v27n3 August 2019

 

FICC web report, August 2019

This article is available online at tinyurl.com/ficcreport. Type the address into your browser and the online version has all the links in place, so from there you can just click.

Web traffic  
It has been a slow few months as regards visitors to the FICC web site. Average daily visitor numbers have dropped from 12 to 11 and average daily page views from 90 to 63.

The count of visiting countries has risen from 102 to 109 with new entries from Martinique, Armenia, Faroe Islands, North Macedonia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Georgia and Puerto Rico.


for v27n2 May 2019

This article is available online at tinyurl.com/ficcreport — this has changed as Google has discontinued its "short URL" service. Type that address into your browser and the online version has all the links in place, so from there you can just click.

Web site traffic  
At the time of writing, the site is averaging 12 visitors a day who, among them, look at 90 web pages. We have now had a visitor from every US state, with North Dakota completing the list. The new countries since the last report are Belize and Uzbekistan bringing the total to 102. This leaves 138 countries from which we have never had a visitor, ranging from Afghanistan to Zambia.


for v27n1 February 2019

This article is available online at www.goo.gl/hkVqST [that no longer works - use tinyurl.com/ficcreport instead]. Type that address into your browser and the online version has all the links in place, so from there you can just click.

Record Months
Visitor numbers, 6th December 2018
Click to enlarge

Web traffic  

As the last report was written, the site was experiencing the highest ever level of daily page views by a factor of three and the total at the end of the day was 624. Levels remained high for more than a month but never exceeded 17th September. Page views have now dropped again to previous levels. There is a graph showing the weeks of hyperactivity on the web version of this report.

We also had our 5,000th visitor on 6th November (the visitor count was explained in v26n1). In v26n3 it was reported that we had been visited by all but 5 of the USA states and travellers were encouraged to fill the gaps. There is now only one missing state remaining, North Dakota.

New flags since the last report are UAE, Equatorial Guinea, Fiji, Zimbabwe,Luxembourg and our 100th country, Laos.


for v26n4 November 2018

This article is available online at www.goo.gl/hkVqST. Type that address into your browser and the online version has all the links in place, so from there you can just click.

Forgeries site

In May 2017, following the death of FICC's founding father, David Olson, his online #1s shop numones.com disappeared. The information held on his subsidiary site, NumOnesIdentifier.com was backed up to FICC's own version, forgeries.info. This has proved to be a wise move, because NumOnesIdentifier has disappeared too - presumably because the domain was allowed to expire.

Web traffic  

As I write this on 17th September, we have had more than 600 page views on the site today and that is getting on for three times the previous record set on December 19, 2017. Either there is the prospect of a new member or the site is being "crawled" by a search engine and our page contents and links are being updated in their records. Both scenarios are positive.

New flags since the last report are Sri Lanka, Andorra (allegiance not specified), The Bahamas, Aland Islands, Uruguay and Papua New Guinea.


for v26n3 August 2018

This article is available online at www.goo.gl/hkVqST. Type that address into your browser and the online version has all the links in place, so from there you can just click.

Web traffic  

Page views from Japan continue to rise and it has now taken second place in the rankings from the UK.

Our flags counter accumulates most data at the national level but for the USA does so by state (50 plus Washington D.C.). We are missing five: District of Columbia, Maine, Mississippi, North Dakota and South Dakota. Please log into the site whenever you visit these so that we can complete the set.

New flags since the last report are Israel, Bangladesh, Estonia, Iraq, Honduras and Morocco.


for v26n2 May 2018

FICC web report, March 2018, submitted 9th March

This article is available online at www.goo.gl/hkVqST. Type that address into your browser and the online version has all the links in place, so from there you can just click.

Updates  
The FICC catalog and detail pages have been updated with the Lithuania and Russia occupation changes reported in the last Journal. This also prompted a new detail page for the Ostland overprints.

Flags 9th March 2018

Web traffic  
Having identified the "rise of China" in the last report, this has now been outdone by Japan. Since records began in July 2016, Japan used to be consistently in the "mid teens" in our table of visitors and was fifteenth in December 2017. In January this year it rose to seventh, in February fourth and on 1st March had taken third place from China.

New flags since the last report are: Lebanon, Costa Rica, Ghana, Libya, Cuba and Cambodia.


v26n1 February 2018

FICC web report, February 2018

This article is available online at www.goo.gl/hkVqST. Type that address into your browser and the online version has all the links in place, so from there you can just click.

Web traffic  
We started recording visitors to the FICC web site using Flag Counter in July 2016. At first, we only logged visits to a few key pages, but from October 2017 visits to all pages have been recorded. Since that change (a period of 54 days at the time of writing), we have averaged 6.7 visitors per day with each viewing 4.5 pages.
The rise of China in those visitors has been noted. In June 2017, China was 9th in our visitors list, in July it was 6th and by September China was 3rd. On 5th December it retains 3rd place with 129 visitors (6.0% of the total), behind the UK (178 visits, 8.3%) and the USA (1,069, 49.7%).
The counter tries to ignore visits from the same computer in the same week, but if you access the site on a laptop, a tablet and a mobile phone - or again after eight days - these will all be counted as "new" visitors. The system ignores the frequent visits by me, the web administrator.

New flags since the last report are: Greece, Serbia, Isle of Man, Curacao, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong and most recently Balarus.

If you have any suggestions for future developments on the web site, please make them known.


v25n4 October 2017

FICC web report, October 2017

This article is available online at www.goo.gl/hkVqST. Type that address into your browser and the online version has all the links in place, so from there you can just click.

Web site traffic  
The number of visitors to the web site doubled for the period mid-June to late July and I thought the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) measures were taking effect. But they dropped down again after that to an average of around 10 per day. So the surge remains unexplained. In the last three months we have had 400 individual visitors bringing the total of countries to 68, the most recent additions being Pakistan, Nigeria, South Africa and Nepal.

Web site catalog progress
The remaining detail pages to the end of the FICC catalogue were completed in July and August. This was much earlier than the target of the end of the year and attributable to some hard work and the earlier geographic approach: all the European pages were written in 2016 and most first issues since 1990 have been from Europe.
There is a list on the web site of images not yet included in the web catalogue. If you have any of the stamps that are "missing", please send a scan at your highest resolution to webmaster@firstissues.org.
The next stage, after a break for other projects, will be to fill the blanks in the FICC Catalogue pages - mostly perforation and watermark details and the like.

If you have any suggestions for future developments on the web site, please make them known.


v25n3 July 2017

FICC web report, July 2017

This article is available online at www.goo.gl/hkVqST. Type that address into your browser and the online version has all the links in place, so from there you can just click.

Web traffic  
We have had a total of 1,140 visitors from 64 countries since July 2016, when records began. That's just under 400 for the quarter-year with five new countries: Latvia, Austria, Egypt, Lithuania and most recently Iceland.

Web Site Catalog Progress
The project to write detail pages for every entry in the Catalog began in late 2015. Page 5 (1900-1913) is nearly complete and that is well over half way. There is a reasonable chance of completing the work by the end of 2017 or early 2018. Members are invited to check the pages for inaccuracies, either philatelic or linguistic and report them to webmaster@firstissues.org.

Forgeries
After receiveing the sad news that David Olson had died, the information on his numonesidentifier site was preserved in a new companion site for FICC at forgeries.info. David's stamp site, a great source for images, has already been removed.


v25n2 April 2017

FICC web report, February 2017

This article is available online at www.goo.gl/hkVqST. Type that address into your browser and the online version has all the links in place, so from there you can just click.

Forum
Invitations were sent to all FICC members to join the online forum and 21 have done so. The invitations are time-limited so if you need another, just write to webmaster@firstissues.org. Postings have been sparse so far, but it is hoped that traffic will pick up.

Web site traffic  
As at 3rd February, we'd had 757 visitors from 59 countries, the most recent new flags being Finland, Jamaica and Iran.

social

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
One of my new-year resolutions is to improve the site's SEO, in other words, attract more visitors by improving our standing on the various search engines. One of our failings is lack of mentions in social media. Without wishing to stereotype FICC members or stamp collectors in general, they are not likely to be the most active users of social media simply because most did not grow up with it. I have added buttons to the home page to share the site on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and to email it to a contact. If you have an account with these services, please click and share it, then come back every month-or-so and do it again.

Web Site Catalogue Progress
Detail pages are now in place for the first four pages of the FICC catalog, 1840-1899. I am taking a short break at this point to work on another project, but will be back on duty writing FICC pages by the time of the next quarterly report.


v25n1 January 2017

QR

This article is available online at www.goo.gl/hkVqST. Type that address into your browser and the online version has all the links already in place, so from there you can just click. You can also scan this QR code to get there.

Web Site Catalogue Progress
The Africa pages are now in place and by the time you read this, they should have all their links, index entries and other attributes. There will be another batch of stamp images required for which all assistance will be appreciated. The next target is French colonies.

Auction Listings
We have resumed posting details of the auctions on the web site.

Forum
Invitations have been sent to all members to join the online forum. You need a google mail or gmail account (both free) to join and to log in subsequently, but forum postings can be directed to your normal email account.

Sources
The recommendation for this issue is StampWorldHistory, an ambitious site and of particular note are its flowcharts of stamp issues. French African colonies will be linked on the web site as this was very useful in building the Africa web pages.

Stamp prices
I have been giving some thought to whether we should give some approximate prices on the site. The 2006 WPE display included an analysis of first issue prices and I think collectors would find it helpful to judge and prioritise what they can afford. If we go ahead, I only envisage doing so for the FICC catalogue of #1s and only giving an indicative price range. This leads to the question of format as space is limited, catalogues exaggerate, intellectual property rights might apply and approximation will mean I will not have to revisit the exercise. I am no mathematician and do not want to transgress any conventions, but perhaps showing the significant digit and the number of zeros following would work, so 32 would mean about $300, 16 would be a million and “c” would be less than $1. All suggestions welcomed.

flag

Web Site Traffic
Watching the site’s flag counter accumulate is almost as much fun as collecting stamps. As at 1st November, we’ve had 373 visitors from 43 countries. Most of those are from the US (43%), then Brazil, GB, Germany and Canada.

Our Alexa rating has risen from 26.3 million to 24.4 million. As you might have guessed, Google is #1.


v24n4 October 2016

This article is available online at www.goo.gl/hkVqST, or www.tinyurl.com/ficcreport, or http://bit.ly/2a9GI9v - just type one of those into your browser. The online version has all the links already in place, so all you have to do is click on one of the underlined words/phrases and you will be transported to that section of the web site.

Exhibits
The exhibits pages were developed just in time for the previous issue (v24n3). These are designed to feature displays too long to be shown entirely in the Journal. Consideration was given to the intellectual property rights of the exhibit owners and so the resolution of the displays is good enough to view on screen but not good enough to download and republish by a site visitor. The pdf dowload capability is restricted to members by password. Members must contact Nick Blackburn (webmaster@firstissues.org) to get the login and password.

Web Site Catalogue Progress
In the last three months, the detail pages for Europe, South America, Central and North America and Asia have been completed. In the countries category, that just leaves the Middle East (in progress at the time of writing) and Africa. Concentrating on sub-groups in this way has made the job easier in that just a few catalogues are needed at one time and the current plan is to continue after that with French Colonies and Indian States, at which point Page 3 of the web site Catalogue should be easy to complete.

Forum
No suggestions were forthcoming on setting up a new FORUM (see the request in the last issue of the Newsletter). A FICC Google chat group has been set up to give that service a try and, if it meets our needs, all members for whom FICC have an email address will be invited to join. [Editor: This is very much like our former web site FORUM. Think of it as a Bulletin Board in which you can post your comments or questions and receive replies from other members. Several topic areas have already been created. Unlike the previous FORUM where you had to log onto the FICC web site to see if there were any new posts, this new version delivers the new postings to you in your email inbox. However, you must log onto the web site to reply.}

wbm

Way Back Machine
The WayBackMachine has been taking periodic backups of the FICC web site since October 2002. Some of these include parts of the FORUM discussions prior to the site crash - although the topic replies are incomplete. Nevertheless, the WBM archives give us a flavor of the discussions: this link is from 2006. I have also nominated the FICC site for the British Library's archive.

Sources
As previously reported, the Journal Index has been brought up to date. I normally read the Journal (Newsletter) on paper, but Kurt Streepy supplied copies on CD for the index build. That has been a revelation - $10 for a full set of all Newsletters on CD is great value for anyone with an interest in stamps and an absolute bargain for first issues collectors. It is proving a valuable resource in writing the detail pages in the web site Catalogue.
Colnect is a useful secondary source of stamp images.

12Jul16
12th July 2016

Traffic Counter
A Flag Counter has been added to the site to log the numbers and locations of visitors. Visit additions are triggered only when someone visits one of four pages (Home, Exhibitions, Forum and this update page). Repeat visits in the same month from a single device are not be double-counted.
According to WorthOfWeb, the FICC site is worth $58. It adds that this evaluation is 893 days old but cannot be recalculated because our Alexa rank has fallen below 30 million. FreeSiteWorth puts the value at $741.

aug16
flags
1st Aug 2016
1st September 2016
flag1Oct
1st October 2016


v24n3 July 2016

In the last issue of the Journal (v24n2), I described recent changes to the FICC web site. I intend to provide a quarterly summary of further progress so that members can begin to take advantage of the web site offerings again.

Please note that there are two versions of the web site and you can switch between them by clicking Old or New in the header menu: all of these changes refer the new version of the site.

Having brought the index of Journal articles up to date, I am concentrating on two main areas. Firstly, I aim to complete the detail pages to go with the existing Catalogue, a long job, probably a few years before completion. Secondly, in parallel, developing a new way of accessing the data by category, linking, for example, all the Dutch Colonies.

On the detail pages, broadly following the existing entries, I hope to include:

For the categories, I have used two lists, the main countries listed by Gibbons in the specialized catalogues, and the colonies and other entities listed by Scott at the beginning of Scott Classic. That is a reasonable starting point but there will be problems as work progresses. For example, Gibbons has three volumes (Parts 12-14) titled Africa since Independence and they have not been updated since the 1980s. I also foresee complications in deciding how to deal with Offices Abroad and Occupation Issues. Nevertheless, the plan is working for now.

In the beginning, I wrote the new pages chronologically, completing the first and second pages of the FICC Catalogue (1840-59 and 1860-70) but have switched to progressing geographically, starting with Europe, and I now intend to complete all the country categories first.

If any other members would like to help in the research, please let me know, especially if you have access to Michel catalogues, as I only have Klassic Europe 1840-1900. You can email me as webmaster@firstissues.org.

An interesting aspect of this exercise is the exploration of new resources on the internet and elsewhere. I have used Dead Country Stamps (dcstamps.com) for some time, but have only recently found StampWorldHistory.com and that led me to The Statesman’s Year-Book Historical Companion, published in 1988, which is proving very useful in writing the historical descriptions for the detail pages.

I am writing this the day after receiving Journal v24n2 in which suggestions were invited for resuming the FICC bulletin board. Please give this some thought and respond if you have not already done so.


v24n2 April 2016

A Note from the Webmaster

NewOld

Jesper Andersen (FICC #169) designed and built the FICC web site. The site contained the all-important FICC catalogue of 779 entries and around 120 detail pages. When Jesper stepped down as Webmaster, I (Nick Blackburn, FICC #181) eventually took over. In late 2015, I set to work on the task of finishing the detail pages and bringing the site up-to-date. The progress so far is:

Completing all the detail pages will take quite some time and members are invited to help, although how this would be organised is uncertain.

One thing we do need to decide on is how to get the Forum going again. The old Forum entries were lost when the site crashed in 2009. Jesper managed to restore older entries from a 2007 backup but the Forum has crashed again. It has been suggested that we try a simpler approach such as a Yahoo Group or similar. It is a debate the club should have and, ironically, it would be very useful to have an online Forum to discuss how to have a Forum.

If you have a suggestion or an idea, please share it.

Page created 11 Jun 2016 Page updated 01-Oct-2021