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first issues > next web report in draft

Draft of the next Web Report

Submission dates are (from 2018): circa 15th Mar, 15th Jun, 15th Sep and 15th Dec

http://tinyurl.com/ficcreport

http://bit.ly/2a9GI9v

Back - flags


for v27n4 November 2019

DRAFT

FICC web report, November 2019, submitted 15th September 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, bring the country total to 112, out of a possible 241.


for v27n3 August 2019

DRAFT

FICC web report, August 2019, submitted 18th June 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

DRAFT

FICC web report, May 2019, submitted 12th March 2019

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

Web traffic  
At the time of writing, the site is averaging 12 visitors a day who, between 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

DRAFT

FICC web report, February 2019, submitted 12th Dec 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.

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 continued to remain 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

DRAFT

FICC web report, November 2018, submitted 17th Sep 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 one of FICC's founders, David Olson and the disappearance of his online #1s shop numones.com, 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

DRAFT

FICC web report, August 2018, submitted 14th June

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. The current statistics are: USA 45.2%, Japan 9.3%, GB 8.4%.

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

DRAFT

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.


for v26n1 February 2018

DRAFT

FICC web report, December 2017, submitted 5th Dec

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 US (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.


v25n4 October 2017

DRAFT

FICC web report, August 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  
The number of visitors doubled for the period mid-June to late July and I thought the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) measures were taking effect, but they dropped back 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.

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 found and I would like to make a special request for help with the Saudi Arabia page as we have none of the four images required. If you have any of the following: Sc-L1 (1916 SG1), Sc1 (1925 SG190), Sc69 (1926 SG254) or Sc138 (1934 SG316), 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

DRAFT

FICC web report, May 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.

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.



v25n2 April 2017

DRAFT

FICC web report, February 2017

This article is available online, with links in place, at www.goo.gl/hkVqST.

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.




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1st February 2017
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1st January 2017
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1st December 2016
flag1
1st November 2016
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1st October 2016



Page created 5 Oct 2016 Page updated 19-Mar-2020