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.

It was inevitable that I would start collecting again. While I knew I couldn’t live vicariously through Josh’s collection forever, the combination of building Zistle and finding my childhood collection intensified my hunger for starting up again. After some deliberation, I decided to begin by building a football collection. It is by far my favorite sport and since Josh collects baseball, our collections would complement each other.

So for Christmas, we adventured to our local hobby store and I decided on a box of 2007 Upper Deck Artifacts hoping that I might get lucky and score an Adrian Peterson rookie card. I wasn’t quite that lucky but I was extremely pleased with my pulls from my first box break. I scored four  relic cards including a Michael Vick, which supposedly Upper Deck removed from all of their 2007 releases. TO was another great one for me.

I pulled six rookies as well including a gold parallel of Trent Edwards numbered to 99. I also nabbed a red parallel of Philip Rivers numbered to 99.

I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get an autograph but the shop owner made it up to me by giving me a Jay Cutler rookie (since we share the same last name). A nice touch I wouldn’t get with an online retailer.

My first box break was awesome but using Zistle to add the cards to my collection and using the Box Breaks feature was by far more exciting. For the first time, I could enter my box breaks and build my collection using the site that we had been laboring over the last few months. Pretty cool.

Breaking a box is one of the most exciting experiences in card collecting. How can you tell? The number of collectors who  share that experience online in card collecting forums, posting on blogs and even videos on YouTube. The reason is obvious–it is fun to share your pulls with others who are also passionate about cards and if you get screwed you want to rant. For readers, it is fun to read/watch, each break is unique, and there is a chance that someone could really get lucky or pull a really rare card.

While it is entertaining, it is also informational and provides unique insight into what breaking a box of a particular brand is really like. We want information on the number of pulls and how good they are. Which is the best box for autos? What about rookies? While individual reviews are helpful, you need to read several to get an accurate picture of how that product is performing. So when we started building our Box Breaks feature, we knew we needed a tool for members to share their box breaks but we also wanted to organize the data so that it would be a useful informational resource.  

In order to achieve this, we created a uniform method to evaluate the pulls from each box. A simple rating system would be too vague to be really useful. So, in addition to a rating, we determined the most important categories for any box: total pulls, autos, relics, parallels, inserts, and duplicates. When members break a box, they enter the cards they pulled from each category and that information is averaged with all other breaks. That information is available to all members and formatted so that you can easily sort by each attribute. So you can see which box has the most rookies, the most autos or which is the highest rated. 

This system accomplishes a few things simultaneously. The most important is that it is a really easy way for anyone to share and track their box breaks. You don’t need a camera or a blog. It also creates an unbiased, aggregated source of information on boxes from the collecting community. Zistle doesn’t sell boxes and we aren’t affiliated with any particular brand so all reviews will be posted. And most importantly, it is a really useful tool for making decisions about boxes based on a variety of attributes. 

We realize that this will not replace the in-depth commentary of your favorite blogger–and we don’t want it to!  We are trying to develop a tool that will be useful to bloggers as well as readers and of course Zistle members. If you would like to be one of the first people to try it out and give us feedback, be sure to sign up for our private beta launching in January at www.zistle.com. We need you!

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!