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

You will also be able to see recently added and recently updated sets for those of you who like to see the new images and cards on Zistle. To find sets on Zistle, simply select the sport and search for the sets you are interested in.

Each set page will have a set image, set description and release date. As always, if the information is not included you can add this information. We’ll be adding more fields soon but we’d love to hear from you what information you’d like to see added to the library set and subset pages. What would be helpful to you? What information are you missing?

We are still working on improving the Library – it is far from a finished product. Next up is getting set experts up and running.  Thanks for your patience set experts.

The millionth card is  was added by Ringo73 of The Phillies Room. The card is an unnumbered card from the 1986 Tastykakes set. Since joining June 11th, Ringo has been busy adding cards and images to the Zistle library from his Phillies collection and already has over 109,818 contribution points.

Thanks to all of our contributing members for being a part of helping the Zistle library grow. Now on to two million! The race is on!

We’ve also been really thrilled about the level of feedback so far. We’ve been able to fix issues quickly and we’ve had more questions and interaction from the Zistle community than we have had in a long time. One of the things we learned this week is that the Zistle concept can be a little confusing when you are first starting out. We sometimes forget this because most of our members have been with us for so long that we take for granted that new users will know how to use the site.

This week, we are going to be working on creating some getting started guides, help text and knowledge base articles to help new and old members better utilize the new Zistle. We’ll be combing through your questions over the past few weeks and you’ll start to see help text within the application. If you’re already a pro, you will be able to remove these alerts and tips but hey, you may learn something new.

As always, we’d love your help to make Zistle better. If there is anything that initially confused you when you first joined Zistle, please let us know in the comments or send us a note with the feedback tool and we will add it to our guides and help text. Help us help you make it easier to use Zistle.

Collection New Look and Feel

Similar to the rest of the site, the collections tab is getting a new look and feel that makes it easier to use. This includes inline pricing, a fixed sidebar for easy scrolling, multi-select and a detail pane.

Multi-Select and Bulk Actions

We want it to be as easy as possible for collectors to add their collection to Zistle. Now you’ll be able to select all cards, a group of cards or one by one and bulk add or remove them to your collection.

The controls will be very similar to selecting multiple files on your computer’s file system.

• Hold CTRL to select multiple cards
• Hold SHIFT to select multiple cards in a row
• Select ALL selects all cards on that page

Once those files are selected, you can add or remove them from your collection using our bulk edit feature. We also plan to add a way for you to add cards to your tradelist and wantlist if not in this release, in the near future.

Detail Pane

We have replaced our detail view with a detail pane that is completely integrated within both list and gallery view. Clicking on each card name will show a closable pane at the bottom of the page that will display all of the details that you used to see in the detail view and more.

In addition to the card image, team, card attributes, pricing and information about who added the card and images, you will be able to see trading information including who wants the card and has the card up for trade. There are also links to see that card and set in the library (more details soon on library). In addition to being able to show more content about the card, you will be able to click through cards one by one and get information without losing your context.

Card Notes

You may have noticed that card notes are no longer in the detail view.We’ve moved card notes to a new column in list view. When a card is in your collection and you hover over it in list view, a pencil icon will appear in the note column. If you click on the icon, a pop-up will appear that will allow you to add a new note.

When your note is saved, a note icon will appear that you can hover over and see your note anytime you are in list view. Pretty fancy, huh? This way, you can easily see which cards have a note and read it instantly.

We’d love to hear your feedback about any of these new features and improvements at http://feedback.zistle.com or in the comments. Our target is to roll out the next release in early June and we are making great progress toward that goal. We’ll be asking for some of you to be beta testers before we roll it out in full production. If you’re interested in helping us test the new version, email me at ashley@zistle .com or just add a comment below.

Zistle needs to be more social. One of the ways that we can do that is by making member activity on the site more visible. So we’ve added activity streams to the dashboard throughout the new site that will highlight member activity.

The above example only shows new members but you will see recent activity including box breaks, new sets being added to the library, new images being added and more.

Alerts – See what you need to do

We’ve also added alerts on your dashboard to make it easier to see changes and new items that require your attention. This will include trade proposal updates, new Zistle features, contact updates, library updates and more.

Alerts tell you information that you need to know or items that require your attention. You can delete them when you are finished with that item or keep them up as long as you’d like as a reminder.

Remember, if you have feedback go to our feedback page and let us know: http://feedback.zistle.com

Vote for New Features

One of the features that we are most excited about is the ability for Zistle members to suggest and vote on new feature ideas. All Zistle members will have 15 votes that you can use to vote for features that you or other members suggest. You will only get 15 votes however, when an idea which you voted for is either closed or implemented, you will receive those votes back. You can also choose how many votes (1-3) you want to cast for each feature. So if you REALLY want one particular feature, you can cast 3 votes.

See what we’re working on

Since Zistle started, our members have given some awesome ideas and suggestions. With our new system, you will actually be able to see what features we are working on, which ones we have planned and which user submitted ideas we have implemented.

Better Response Times

There are a few reasons why we needed to make a switch. The first was that we needed a better admin interface for answering your questions and resolving your problems. We want to be more responsive in answering your questions. Our new tool will quite literally hunt us down if we aren’t doing our job.

Get Started

If you want to get started suggesting and voting for new ideas, go to our new Feedback Site. We have seeded the new feature forum with some suggestions that were already mentioned in the previous forum but we know that there are more out there.

We are working on launching some new features soon and we would love to add some more user suggested voted. Get voting!

My nephew is 8 years old and is just getting into the hobby. The Giants winning the pennant last year has accelerated his interest in all things Giants including baseball cards. I was particularly excited to take him on his first trip to a real card shop. I got to experience first-hand all of the excitement and sense of wonder that a card shop contains for a young collector. It also reminded me how simple card collecting is when you are a kid. As we were looking through the Giants singles, the card shop owner found an autographed Buster Posey rookie. It was fairly priced and I was excited at our good fortune. While I was excited to buy the card for him, my nephew simply wasn’t interested. He looked at me “No, Auntie Ashley. I already have a Buster Posey card”.

Despite my best efforts to convince him of its value, my nephew didn’t care about the value of the card or the fact that it was autographed. He simply wanted to collect one of each of his favorite players. It was all about his love of baseball and the Giants. The 2010 Topps base card was just as valuable to him as a rookie auto and there was nothing that anyone could say to convince him otherwise.

Later that week, I introduced him to Zistle. We have had some great times since Zistle launched but watching my nephew play on the site and say “Zistle is awesome” was a pretty cool moment for me. Not only was it really rewarding to have someone in my family think that the site was awesome, but I learned so much about our site by looking over his shoulder while he tried to figure it out.

Lesson 1: Collectors (at least 8 year old collectors) love pricing

Josh and I have always been slightly hesitant to introduce more advanced pricing features on Zistle. We wanted to focus on collectors and the joy of the hobby rather than focusing on price and the book or even auction value of each card. However, ironically enough, my nephew who didn’t care at all about the pricing in the card shop, clicked every single Giants card he could find to try and figure out the price. I watched him click through our site for hours, one by one, clicking on the card to see if there was pricing info for that card. It may have been the excitement of the hunt or the attention span of an 8 year old but he was obsessed with pricing. In a new release of Zistle, we are going to be adding pricing to the list view in the collection tab. We don’t want to focus on pricing as the most important aspect of our site, but we want to make it more accessible.

Lesson 2: Cards without images don’t exist

This again may have something to do with being 8, but my nephew played on Zistle for  total of 10 hours in a few days and he did not once click on a card without an image. We know how important images are to the Zistle experience and this completely reinforced that point. So how do we get more images on Zistle? Josh is working on building a mass image importing tool to help both our users in uploading their images and to help us add more stock images. This is something that you have all asked for many times and we are excited that we are getting closer to offering this feature.

Stay tuned later this week for some additional updates on some new features that will be coming out in the next month or so. We’ll be including some previews as well as our new product roadmap.

Main Set now appears on top and is automatically created for new sets

These were feature on Zistle before we rebuilt the site and they are finally back. Rather than having to scroll down to the middle of the long list of subsets, Main Set will automatically appear on the top rather than in alphabetical order. Also, if you are creating a new set, you no longer have to create the Main Set subset – it is automatically done for you.

Add team easily in list view

This is another feature that existed on the old Zistle and is back by popular demand. We have made it easier to quickly add team to a card in list view. In case you are new to the site – here is how it works.

In list view, when a team has not been assigned a blue ‘add team’ link will appear in the team column. If you click the link, a text box will appear where you can begin typing any part of the team name and it will auto-populate a list of matching teams.

Simply select the team from the drop-down list and just like that you have added the team. If you make a mistake and select the wrong team, you will need to flag the card in order to change it.

Making Bulk Import Cards a little more user friendly

One of our major new features for the latest release of Zistle was adding a way for users to mass import cards into the Zistle library. This was a pretty big feature for us and one that we have been talking about for a long time. I was recently trying to fix some issues with Bowman Chrome and realized that we could make importing cards a lot more user-friendly.

The first thing that we did is made the formatting guidelines for importing cards appear in a new tab rather than opening in the pop-up. If you had a question about how to format your CSV file, the link for formatting guidelines would open in the pop-up. It didn’t fit very well and to go back to the import page, the user had to close the window and start all over again. What a pain! Now, if you want to double check the formatting before importing your cards, the guidleines will display in a new tab and you can easily go back and import the cards.

Which brings us to our second improvement: Zistle will now auto-populate the year, set and subset that you are currently viewing when you are importing cards. Before, if you were adding cards to 2010 Topps Main Set and decided to bulk import, you would have to add that information again. Now that information will automatically appear although you can change it if you are not on the right subset.

One thing I noticed while I was importing cards was that occasionally I would forget to add the file before clicking submit. I would get an error and the wondow would close. What happened? Did the site break? Nope – I just forgot to add the file. I would have to click import cards again, enter in the subset again and do it all over again. Now if you forget to add the file, red text will appear notifying you that a file must be selected to continue. Whew – much easier.

Our hope is that we can give you regular updates on what we are working on behind the scenes to make Zistle. I know we can disappear sometimes working on the site and you won’t hear from us for several weeks and it isn’t always bovious what we are working on. We know you want to hear from us more often and we are working on that. Thanks for being a part of Zistle and helping us make it better.

One of the reasons why this release took so long to materialize (besides some complicated back-end changes) was a lack of focus in terms of what features to focus on first. There are so many ideas out there and so many things that we want to do – but, it is significantly harder to decide what to do first and how to prioritize. So to simplify our process we asked ourselves one simple question: what is stopping most collectors from using Zistle? It was an easy answer – we need better data. So our number 1 focus for this release is to make tools and features that make it easier for you to get your data into Zistle and allow you access to get it out. More data, better data, free data…

More data – Bulk import into the Zistle Library and to your collection

Many of our members have spent countless hours entering cards one by one into the Zistle database. With the next release, members will be able to mass import cards from a .csv file directly into the Zistle database. This allows Zistle members to leverage their own spreadsheets as well as spreadhseets and checklists that already exist online and import them into the database which will make it a lot easier to increase the number of cards in the database.

We would like to add similar functionality for adding cards to your collection and wantlists. We could really use your imput on whether or not you think this system would be useful to you and if you have any suggestions for how to make it the most useful process for you. Obviously, members without their entire collections will not benefit from this as much as users with more data to add. We are hoping that this will help people who have been on the fence about Zistle make the leap. Be sure to give us your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks!

Better Data – Tools for improving the accuracy of the database

So more data is great, but it is no secret that there are some issues with inaccurate and duplicate cards in the database. Right now, our flagging system works well for individual errors or updating a single card. However, when an entire set is incorrect or there are a series of duplicates, there is not a very good system for bringing that to our attention and correcting it. We are approaching this in a few different ways. First, you will be able to flag a set or a subset as being a mess (that probably won’t be the official term – but when I think of 1990 Topps or anything Starquest sets, that is the only way to describe them). This way, we can identify and track sets that need a substantial amount of work and resolve it more effectively. Those of you who have emailed me or shared feedback on Get Satisfaction will be able to appreciate that these requests often slip through the cracks.

We are also making some significant changes to the Library tab. Currently, the Library tab is designed to serve as a reference area to look up cards not in your collection. On the new site, it will serve as a wiki-style view of each set on Zistle. So for example, you will be able to go to the 2010 Topps page and see a comprehensive view of each set, with a list of every subset, the number of cards in each subset, and images of the cards. There will also be a discussion area to hash out style issues such as red ink versus black or misprints. In addition, we will have set experts that will be able to approve the cards added to that particular set and monitor any changes that happen to the set. This will help take some of the administration burden off of Josh and I and allow more consensus within the community on style points and the nuances of each set.

Free your data – Exporting your collection/wantlist from Zistle

This is a feature we have talked about for a long, long time. One that many of our detractors mention as a downfall of the site and certainly makes people nervous (especially when we don’t blog for a few months). We do firmly believe that you own your data and we recognize that it is nice to be able to print off your collection and wantlists for card shows, etc. As a disclaimer, there will be some limits to the amount of data that can be exported at one time (this is primarily a technology barrier). We haven’t worked it out exactly but it will be something on the order of a limit of 10,000 entries at one time – which seems workable to us. We will be monitoring the exporting and reserve the right to disallow this privilege or cancel someone’s account if we suspect abuse for obvious reasons ( mean spirited people be advised). To our valued members – thank you for trusting us with your data for the last year and a half. We are excited to be able to launch this feature.

We know that is a lot of information. Please give us feedback in the comments below. If you have ideas about how to make bulk importing into wantlists/collection better than we laid out above, please let us know. Can’t wait to hear what you think.