Our web host is going to be performing some software upgrades on our servers this evening so the website will be down for a short while.  It should be in the middle of the night so hopefully most people won’t be impacted.

Over the next couple of days we will be rolling out some performance upgrades to Zistle.  Sorry if the site was a little wonky this evening, we were pushing out the first of our upgrades and thought we could do it without any disruption….

We know that things have slowed down as the size of the library has gone up and more and more people use the site.  We are going to do our best to fix the problems but we would like your help with something.  Please let us know what is slow!  If you encounter slowness with the site please use our feedback tool (or go to help.zistle.com) and let us know what happened.  The more specific you are the better, e.g. “I was searching through josh’s tradelist on his profile for the term ‘knoblauch’ and it took 15 seconds to load” is great, it lets us know what to investigate.

Thanks for your help and happy Zistling.

We are pushing out some changes to get ready for a new, hopefully exciting , feature that we have been working on.  We should only be down for a few minutes.  More info to come as we get nearer the release.

UPDATE:  Everything has been resolved.  Sorry for any weirdness that you may have encountered.

Zistle will be down for about 15 minutes this afternoon as we do a little site maintenance.  Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE: All done.  Happy Zistlin’

I just wanted to let everyone know that we are still alive!  I have been getting emails from concerned Zistlers wondering if we had been kidnapped and I just wanted to reassure everyone that everything will be back to normal soon.  Ashley and I have finally finished our cross country move, BUT, we do not have internet in our apartment until this weekend.  So, updates/validations/etc. will be slow until next week because we need to find a coffee shop with wifi to get anything done.  Until then, please bear with us.  Things will be working smoothly again soon!

We just pushed out a few changes as a result of feedback from you guys.

First, we added international support to the trading system.  You can now specify your country, use international zipcodes and enter your state/province/etc. (if relevant) in the edit account screen as well as in your trade proposal mailing info.  We have defaulted current users to the US for now so if you have address information already entered you may need to update it next time you finish a trade if you are international (sorry Canadians…).

Second, we have added the ability to add images to cards via URL.  We have been asked for this on and off for a while and we finally came up with a solution that we like.  In both the new card as well as the card flag form you will see  an area to enter a URL:

You can use this to enter urls from your blog, photobucket, or wherever else you keep images.  You can’t simultaneously upload an image and specify a URL for obvious reasons, if you do we will use the uploaded image.  PLEASE RESPECT OTHER WEBSITES’ IMAGES.  Make sure that you are linking to images that are freely available or that you have permission to use (for example your own).  When you specify a URL Zistle’s servers need to go retrieve that image and we want to make sure that we are playing nice with the other sites out there.

Finally we updated a bunch of minor things that people were encountering, including some odd sorting behaviors.  All of these things were a result of feedback from Zistlers so if you have suggestions let us know!  As always if you run into any issues get in touch either via our feedback tool or in chat!

Our deployment went off without a hitch and the newest addition to Zistle is up and running!

Those of you who have been with us for a while might remember that we used to have a chat room where Zistlers could talk about collecting, how to use the site, or whatever was on their minds.  When we redid the site, that was one of the first things that fell by the wayside.  It was not worth the work (we had a lot of bigger problems with Zistle at that point), but more importantly half of the posts were “Is anyone here?”.  Well now that we have grown and people are almost always online we have brought chat back.  Hopefully some of our more experienced members can help new people get started or people can use it as a starting point for trades.  Ashley and I will try to be online when we can and in chat so you can reach us there when we’re online.

To get started with Zistle Chat you will need a modern web browser (e.g. Chrome, Firefox, Safari) or Flash 10.0 or greater installed (you probably already have that).  You will see a chat link in the header of the app

Just click that link and you will be logged in to Zistle chat.  If you use Zistle Chat in a new tab and then browse the site in another, you will see the number of users in chat in that tab title and it will blink when there are messages that you haven’t  read yet.

As always, let us know if you have any questions or problems with it.  Talk to you soon!

Zistle will be down for maintenance tonight at around 11pm CT as we roll out a new feature!  It should only take 15-20 minutes and then we will be back up.

Zistle is currently down and will be for about 15 minutes while we do a little maintenance.

Update:

And we’re back.  Happy Zistlin’.

At long last we have add Custom Collections!

Custom Collections have been something that Zistlers have been asking for since Zistle’s inception and we have finally gotten them into the system.  Our initial take on Custom Collections makes them act very similarly to a Wantlist or Tradelist on Zistle.  They are a sub-collection of your overall cards and can be managed and tracked individually.  We also added the ability for you to make them “Smart”, in the same way that we automatically add cards to your Wantlists.

Right now we don’t allow you to set the number of cards that are in your Custom Collection but we know that this is a feature that people want and will add it to our feature list.

In the meantime, check out our knowledgebase articles on Custom Collections, let us know if you find any issues, and get started adding your Custom Collections.