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.

Since the new release Zistlers have been doing an amazing amount of work on the Zistle card database. However, despite all of the work going on, the activity streams made it look like Zistle was a ghost town because we didn’t capture any of that information.

Well, last night I put together a system for showing you much more of the work that Zistlers are up to. When people update their collections you will be able to see it and go see if you have any new trade matches. When they add a bunch of cards to the library you can send them a message.

We are still fine tuning what we show and want your feedback on other types of activities that you would like to see.  If you have any ideas let us know in the feedback forum!

As you have have noticed, Zistle has been down much of today, because our webhost heroku.com is down… again.  We will be moving off of Heroku later tonight to something more stable.  So, by tomorrow these issues should all clear up.  Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE:  Zistle is down while we migrate.  We should be back up soon.  We will update the blog.

As many of you know, Amazon AWS which hosts a large number of sites (e.g. reddit.com, quora.com, etc.), had some catastrophic failures yesterday.  This resulted in a number of cloud hosted services like Zistle to get knocked down.  Our web host Heroku (which uses Amazon AWS) assures us that they are working as quickly as possible to get the site back online and fully operational but you may see some issues with it early in the day.  Thankfully, we have not lost any data and any work that you have done on the site while it has been in and out should be retained.

We are now looking at other options for hosting to avoid this problem in the future.  Thanks again for your patience.

As many of you may have noticed Zistle has been up and down this morning. Our web host heroku.com has been experiencing technical difficulties (their own site is currently down at the moment) and assures us that they are working to get everything back to normal.

Thanks for you patience as they work through this.

So we finally finished migrating all of the data over… unfortunately it took a little longer than expected. The good news is that we have it all on our new system and it is much faster. Users with large collections can actually use the site and we will be able to roll out new features much more quickly. The bad news is that it is still a little rough around the edges that we are going out of town in about an hour for the remainder of the week.

Initially I wanted to delay the release, but after talking about it for a while we decided to let you guys have at it–with a few big caveats.

1) There are some issues in internet explorer, so if things seem a little screwy, try firefox.
2) We are not going to have internet access for the next 5 days so if something goes wrong, please be patient.
3) We have moved some things around and not yet had time to update our help site..

With that said, we are switching it live so you should be able to access it once the new DNS records propagate. If you decide to jump in please feel free to let us know what you hate, what you love, bugs you’ve found or whatever else is on your mind via our help site (http://help.zistle.com) or the feedback button on the site. If Beta sites are not your style, just hang tight for a few more days until we wrap up the loose ends.

Have fun and we’ll see you online next week!

We just rolled out a new feature to the Zistle main site! Many of you have asked for a way to annotate cards in your collections, so we added a new view type.  If you are viewing or editing your collection you will now notice a “details” view option is available.  If you select that it will show you your results that look like this:

In addition to being able to edit your collection like the other views, in details view you can add and view notes that you have put on your cards.  If you click “edit note” you will get an input box that you can enter your notes into

If you click save then your note will be attached to that card

So notes will allow you to store information specific to your cards for you to see.  A few things to note about notes:

1. Right now you can only use this view on your own collections
2. If you search while viewing your collection you will search over your notes
3. If you move the quantity of cards to 0 you will lose any notes attached to those cards

Enjoy and if you have any suggestions for improvements we would love to hear them!

Before I talk about the new sports we will be adding to Zistle, I would like to say thanks to Dan from CheapSeatSaints. Not only is he a rockstar contributor to Zistle, but he even has been scanning the wantlists and saw that I needed some cards to complete my Allen and Ginter base set, so he sent them my way. Thanks Dan!

And many more….

Ashley and I have recently been working hard to start integrating other sport cards into Zistle, but we have run into a slight problem. Baseball card information is easy to find, so it was easy to bootstrap the experience and get a lot of card information into Zistle without asking the users to do it all by hand. The “Other” sports card collectors have been historically under-served and we think that Zistle can help, however, there is a chicken and egg problem, wherein it is tough to start serving them because we can’t find the information! So what can you guys do to help? Just let us know if there are communities, collectors, encyclopedias or anything else out there that we might be able to leverage to help the Zistle encyclopedia grow. We have already been contacted by some extremely helpful collectors in the soccer card space, but if you know of anything that we might not be leveraging, let us know.

Thanks again for all of your hard work. We appreciate it.

I just wanted to write a quick note and let everyone know what we’ve been up to–because we’ve been busy. We’ve recently made a lot of progress on the site, especially considering that we can really only work on it during nights and weekends. So here are some of the highlights:

Improved Search
For those of you that used some of our earliest versions of the site, I’m sure you can tell the difference in performance.  We have increased many of our search times by at least an order of magnitude.  In addition we have really expanded the search syntax that you can use.  For example you can now include sport names, years, player names, brands, numbers and even some properties.  Keywords such as “relic”, “rookie” or “autograph” can be used.  So you can now look up “Kirby Puckett 1985 Topps #536″ or “Adrian Peterson rookie” or even “Hockey 1999 Gretzky autograph” and you’ll find what you’re looking for.  As we get more data we hope to expand even further potentially including teams and more.

Revamped Trading Lists
We now use smart lists to help you let people know what you want or are willing to give up.  By that I mean that you can say I want “Kirby Puckett” cards and your want list will show you all of the Kirby Puckket cards on Zistle that you don’t have.  Whats great about this is that as we get more and more cards your lists are automatically updated.  We have many, many more improvements in the pipeline with respect to trading, including trade reccomendations and the ability to embed these dynamic lists in your blog allowing you to manage your cards in on place and access it from many. Expect to hear much more from us about this soon.

Bugs galore!
We are really happy with the quality of the site right now, but we wouldn’t be here without the help of our users.  Thank You!  Please use the feedback tools or send us email, we love to hear from you.  In the end this site is about user participation, thats what will make it work.  So let us know what you want, we’ll be happy to talk with you about it and see if we can’t get it into Zistle.

When launching any website where the bulk of the content is supposed to be created by its users, you are almost always faced with a chicken and egg problem.  It takes content to inspire users to create content.  As a user I don’t want to waste my time on a site that can’t provide me with anything in return, that’s the founders’ job.  So Ashley and I realized that in order to inspire people to help us build an amazing library of sports cards we were going to have to give them a glimpse of what the final product would look like.  We had to show users how useful this thing could really be and thus we had to get enough content in there ourselves to highlight the useful features that Zistle provides.

I spent a lot of time looking around the internet to see if I could find any ready made libraries of cards, images, info, or anything that would get us started.  Ultimately I realized that there wasn’t anything out there that was going to fit our needs, so I did what any entrepreneuring computer scientist would do–I built a web crawler.

I had a couple of criteria for how I wanted the crawler to work.  It had to extract structured data so that way we could provide the pivots and search functions that make Zistle great.  It also needed to get pictures when they were available.  Finally it needed to store everything locally so that we could pay for our own bandwidth when we served things back to users.  After toiling away in PHP for a while I produced a script that we now execute periodically and scans a few of the easily schematizeable web sites out there that have cards.  It loads the appropriate schema mappings for the source and checks out the current content of the site against our existing database to see if there are cards that they have that our not contained in Zistle.  If so, we grab the card info and add it to the Zistle library.

To date we have crawlers written for 4 different sports: baseball, football, basketball and hockey, with more potentially in the pipeline.  As of this posting we have 222,900 cards in our library and this is quickly growing.  We are close to having images of quite a few complete sets and while alpha testing I have been able to enter in my personal collections with a surprisingly high percentage of the cards already in the Zistle library.  By the time we launch I expect these numbers will be even more impressive.

While these numbers are great, the success of Zistle will be determined by our users.  Creating a comprehensive library is a dream that we have, but there is only so much that we can do by scraping the web.  The reason that we started this thing is because we looked and realized that the information wasn’t already out there on the web.  If we just integrate the existing data, we’ll still fall short.  I can’t wait to see what great cards you guys have once we open the doors and look forward to seeing the library grow!