I have been neglecting our blog. It is true and I am deeply, deeply ashamed. But, I have a really good reason.  Josh and I have been completely glued to our computers getting ready to launch the next release of Zistle and I haven’t been able to tear myself away. But tonight I am making myself take a breather to share a preview of the new Zistle.

I know what you’re thinking…the new Zistle? Isn’t Zistle pretty new? Why do you need a new version?

Our current site is really just a prototype that was never intended to be the final product. As many of you know, we have been making gradual improvements to the functionality of the site, mainly in response to your feedback and suggestions. Next, we set out to tackle our trading platform, which allows you to propose and negotiate detailed trades with other Zistle members based on the contents of your WantList/TradeList. It didn’t take us long to realize that building the trading platform meant that almost every area of the site needed to be optimized. Launching our trading functionality was going to have a huge impact and rather than having several small releases, we decided to roll it out in one big release. So here is what you will see when the new Zistle launches.

1. New Look

With the new release, there will be major changes to the overall design of the site. When redesigning the site, we wanted to highlight the beauty of the cards, make the navigation more straightforward and add advanced options while maintaining the simplicity of the site. Plus, some areas just needed a little polish. We also intend on launching LOTS of new sports–more to come on this later.

2. Trading Platform

The trading platform is the major new feature of this release. With our new trading platform, you will be able to search for trading partners based on their WantLists/TradeLists, offer card for card proposals (I will trade you these 15 cards for those 15 cards), and counter offer until an agreement is reached. Each trade negotiation has its own page and stores the history of the proposal. Once the trade is complete, you can rate the trade and all cards will automatically be entered into your collection. It is going to be really, really sweet.

3.  Overall Optimized Experience

Almost every single aspect of the site is getting an upgrade. The dashboard, your collection experience, the library homepage, trading (of course), box breaks. We can’t possibly fit everything that we want to do in the next release but we are trying to make it as awesome as we can. If there is anything that you absolutely cannot live without in the next release, please post it in the comments and we will do our best to include it.

I cannot give an absolute date that we will be launching the next version but we are planning on mid-March at the latest. We hope it is sooner and we work fast but there is still a lot of work to do.

You have been amazing in using the site, giving feedback, sharing your scans and most of all sharing your passion for this great hobby. You deserve the best site that we can provide and we are determined to give it to you.

We have received a few questions about our contribution points system. We wanted to build a system that recognized our amazing members who spend their valuable time adding cards to the library and building their collections on Zistle. Eventually, we would love to build promotions around contributions to reward these members.  Perhaps a gift certificate to an online card retailer for the person with the most contribution points (hint to any online retailers who would consider sponsoring a promotion like this). Anyways, until that wonderful day, it is just for bragging rights. Here is how we assign points if you are interested.

• 1 point for every card in your collection
• 75 points for every card added to the library
• 75 points for every image added to the library
• 50 points for all accepted flags/updates
• 125 points for every box break

I also just want to give a shout out to the contributors on our leaderboard. You guys rock!

Do you like being recognized for your contributions? Where should we show these? Let us know!

We need your help! If you are on Zistle and you notice a card that looks like this…

or this when you hover over it…

we would appreciate it if you could flag it. Simply check the box that states that the image is incorrect but you don’t have the right one. We have had issues with some of the images that have been entered into Zistle and we believe that we have fixed this problem. However, there are still many broken images in our database. If you come across any in your collection, please flag them. There are a few sets that have LOTS of these images. If you find a set like this and you don’t feel like flagging them all yourself, please send us a note using our feedback tool and we will take care of it right away. We have been combing our database trying to remove these broken images but it will take us a while to get through the entire library. Your help is greatly appreciated.

We all need to show off every once in a while. It’s ok, don’t be modest–especially about your cards. If you want to show off your collection on Zistle, now you can! Anyone can view your entire collection by visiting www.zistle.com/username/collection/sport. Visitors do not need to be logged in to see your collections so you can post a link on your blog or share it with anyone that you want.

When visitors access your collection, they will be able to browse in the same way you do when viewing your collection. Your collections are also now accessible from your dashboard by clicking the sport names in the “My Collections” section. What are you waiting for…go show off already!

We have launched the beta version of our teams functionality to our beta site. With this feature you can add a player’s team to the card when editing your collection, browsing the library, adding a card to the library or flagging a card.

All of the current professional teams for all four sports have been entered as well as a few retired, amateur and college teams. When adding team in list view, click on the “add team” link and type in the team name and it will automatically complete your selection. Click the green add button and the team will be added to that card just like that.

Select Add Team

Type name and click green add icon

If the team you are entering is not in our database, you will receive a prompt to add that team to the library.

You cannot see the team name while you are viewing your collection right now. If you would like to add teams to your cards, go to “edit collection” and select “just my cards” and add teams this way.

You will also note a different layout for editing collection. This was necessary to have enough room to display team info. We look forward to hearing your thoughts about this new layout.

We also plan to allow you to sort by team while editing but we have not yet built this functionality. We will likely add it in the next few days. If you can, try to add teams to a few cards and let us know what you think. We would like to make this available as soon as possible.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

It is Valentine’s Day which means that most people are thinking about a different type of cardboard–the type that tells loved ones you love them and/or the cardboard boxes that contain chocolates. Not us! We celebrated Valentine’s day early by heading to the local card shop and buying a box of fresh wax for each other. But it doesn’t stop there. All weekend, we are going to be working on cranking out some great new features for our loyal members because we really love you guys. Here is what we have lined up for our weekend of Zistle love.

Teams! As I write this, Josh is building the infrastructure to add teams. The lists will start with current professional teams but you will be able to add old teams, minor league teams, college teams, etc… We think we have come up with a pretty great solution for adding team to a card quickly as well as adding new teams. Just like adding a new set, a new team will have to be approved before users can see it. This has been a popular feature request and we are excited to launch it.

Layout improvements: Adding teams has forced us to reconsider our layout in list view. We are improving the layout to be able to see more cards at a time in gallery view as well as be able to see the team in list view.

Trading! This is a behemoth of a project which we plan to make a huge dent in this weekend. We are working hard to get this functionality to you. We definitely need people to beta test this for us. We’ll let you know as soon as it is live!

Other Bug Fixes/Improvements: You will definitely see some small updates as well. For example, some improvements/changes to adding cards, the ability to flag sets/subsets and the ability to add a box to the box break page.

At the request of skoormit from A Pack A Day, we added a “Feature Pipeline” page which details all of the features we plan on building. It outlines our vision for Zistle and gives you a chance to review all of the new features before they are code complete. The features are roughly listed in order of deployment but we don’t have specific launch dates to give you. Our Trading Platform is one of our biggest features releases and we plan to launch very soon (within the next two weeks). Please check it out and let us know what you think. As always, continue to share your new ideas and questions at http://getsatisfaction.com/zistle. We love to hear from you!

Our beta site is a great way to test out new features and give us feedback before we launch them to the main site.  However, we recommend that you use the main Zistle site whenever you aren’t testing specific features. Beta is less stable and new features may cause unexpected bugs or issues with the existing site–this is why we launch it to beta first.

So use our main set when you are doing the bulk of your organizing and adding cards if possible. If you use beta, there is a higher probability for an error to occur. We have had a few errors when folks add cards.images on the beta site after we have changed some functionality. We will try to prevent these problems before they occur but beta is going to be less reliable. We just want you to have the best experience possible while at Zistle.

It is 3am and Josh and I have been working all night adding more collection functionality and started to build our trading platform. Somewhere during that time we realized that Zistle passed the 250,000 mark! We have over 250,000 cards in our library now and we are growing faster than ever thanks to some of our rock-star users. We have to give a special shout-out to Shane at Shoebox Legends who has added over 1,000 cards since becoming a member. Wow! Shane has added a ton of hockey cards which is a huge help since we need those cards the most. A big thanks to Shane and all our members who added cards to our library and have been building their collection on Zistle. It is amazing to watch this great community grow. Keep up the great work Zistlers!

If you had some technical difficulties accessing Zistle this afternoon, our server was experiencing a denial of service attack. It was quickly resolved and everything is fine. It had nothing to do with Zistle and we don’t anticipating having this problem in the future. Thanks for your patience!