The Zistle live chat has become a pretty lonely place. The idea has been tossed around by several Zistlers to set up at least one time during the week when people would go online and chat. I saw now is as good of a time as any to get something started. So this Sunday night while the football game is on, we are going to have an official chat session on Zistle. People can organize trades, mingle and get to know newbies. Join in anytime. If you have a blog, please spread the word. One note is that you need to have a Zistle account to access chat so if you mention it to others please let them know. This should be fun. See you Sunday.

by ashley New on Zistle, Trading, Zistle Updates

After we launched live chat, there were quite a few requests to add a forum. And well, we just can’t say no. There is now a Zistle Forum that you should definitely go and check out. As you might have guessed, this will help facilitate the writing of the style guide as well as give you an opportunity to have longer threads between members. If you want a category added, just let me know. The forum is housed at forum.zistle.com and if you are logged into Zistle, you will be automatically logged into the forum as well.

Private messaging is built into the platform and it is called ‘whispering’. If you want to whisper, simply start a new discussion and type in the user’s name in the appropriate field and only they will be able to see your message.Similarly, when you respond to a thread, you can simply enter in the name (the field will auto-complete so you don’t need to type the whole username) and you are all set.

Chat is still available for you to use. For now, they are different experiences but we will most likely integrate them down the road. As always, we love to hear your feedback on what you like, don’t like, think could be better, etc so don’t be shy!

by ashley Features, New on Zistle, Zistle Updates Forum

UPDATE 4/24: Thanks for your patience while we finalized wrestling. It is now up and available for you to enjoy.

UPDATE 4/23 : This has been disabled for the moment as we are working out some details regarding the content.  We’ll update again when we know what the final verdict is here.

It was time to add another sport to Zistle. While racing may seem like the obvious next addition, there were a stack of WCW cards in our collection that forced us to add wrestling. Wrestling cards are purely amazing if you love bad wax. I mean I am not sure you could find a better example of the most absurd cards ever manufactured. Plus, pro-wrestling from the early 90’s brings back some great memories–so I guess we are being a little selfish. I mean I will just let some of these speak for themselves. There is infinite material but here are some of my favorites.

The honorable former governor of Minnesota aka “The Body”

This guy gives me nightmares. I mean look at that claw manoeuvre

The good old Bushwackers. If there was super glue in your shampoo wouldn’t your hands be stuck to your head rather than some else’s head?

I could do this all day. Oh Andre!

We have to give a big thank you to WrestlingTradingCards.com for supplying the photos. They have been compiling this online collection since 2002 and they are extremely dedicated to the great circus known as professional wrestling. Every card provided by Wrestling Trading Cards has a link to their site so if you are interested in learning more, please check them out.

by ashley New on Zistle, Wrestling, Zistle Updates Andre the Giant, Captain Lou Albano, Jesse Ventura, The Bushwackers

Live chat, our most requested feature, just came to Zistle and we are very, very excited to offer this feature to our members. Any member logged into Zistle will be able to access Zistle Live Chat to instantly connect with other Zistle members. There will be one main chat room where all members logged in will appear. You can participate in the main conversation or have a private conversation with any individual member in a separate tab. So you can discuss the topic du jour or work out trade details with other members simultaneously. To initiate a private conversation with a member, just click their username and click ‘ private message’.

You will be able to access Zistle Live Chat from your dashboard and the trading homepage. Members who do not log into Zistle chat will not appear in the chat room so you don’t need to opt out if you are not interested in chatting with other members online.

While we have tested the new chat feature, we anticipate that bugs will arise over the next few days. As always, we rely on you to let us know about any issues you encounter. We work hard to get new features to you as quickly as possible and we appreciate your help when we launch a new feature.

See you soon on Zistle Chat!

by ashley Features, New on Zistle, Zistle Updates Live chat

Zistle’s football library just grew substantially thanks to Mike from Nearmint’s Vintage Football Cards. Mike graciously shared the beautiful scans featured on his reference site the Vintage Football Card Gallery with Zistle and we are extremely excited. I mean you can just see from the image of his site above that these scans are beautiful. If you haven’t checked out the gallery, it is a well-designed site that contains various football sets from 1948-1975 with great images and more information than most sites.

Mike got back into the hobby after a friend got him hooked on 1989 ProSet. After a short time, he started collecting cards from his childhood and in 1999 started selling cards on Ebay.  When Ebay raised thier prices in 2001, Mike launched his own sales site Nearmint Vintage Football Cards and never looked back. TheVintage Football Card Gallery grew from the sales site and 98-99% of the cards in the gallery were at one time in Mike’s own personal collection or sold through his site–meaning that he has spent quite a bit of time with his scanner.

Mike is a true Zistle hero. Not only does he run a fabulous site selling vintage football cards but he has created an amazing resource for vintage football card collectors. We are truly honored that his gallery is now a part of the Zistle library.

by ashley Football, Meet Us, New on Zistle, Trading, Uncategorized, Zistle Updates Nearmint's Vintage Football Cards, Vintage Football Card Gallery

Many of you noticed that we quietly added Soccer over the weekend. We have been working on launching this for a while and we have been honored to work with some amazing soccer collectors on getting this launched. I want to give a big thank-you to Chuck from Chuck’s Used Cards and collector Gary Battaglia for their generosity with their collections and knowledge. Gary is trying to amass a collection of all Upper Deck MLS cards ever made (quite a goal) and shared his detailed spreadsheets with us to seed our database. Chuck connected us with Gary and is committed to sharing his Soccer collection with the Zistle community. I can’t wait to see Soccer grow on Zistle.

by ashley New on Zistle, Soccer, Zistle Updates Chuck's Used Cards

Yes, we are finally launching this beast of a project. The new Zistle is live and ready for your enjoyment. Woo hoo! From the moment we launched our beta prototype a few months ago, we have been working on building this next iteration and it is finally here.

The New Zistle Homepage

The big deal for this release is, of course, trading. You can search for trading partners based on the content of their WantLists and TradeLists, you can see what matches you have between you and another member and you can completely negotiate and track trades. Please encourage those in your trading circle to give it a try and give us feedback.

I think another one of the major improvements is the dashboard. Not only is it a lot easier on the eyes, you can now add a photo, add a website, propose a trade and edit your box breaks from your dashboard.

New and improved Profile Page

In addition, we are saying goodbye to our beta site (http://beta.zistle.com). Moving forward, that url will redirect to the main site.

You may notice that we had to scale back our functionality slightly for this release but we are extremely pleased with the product overall. Josh and I are really looking forward to hearing your feedback about this launch. We think the interface is much cleaner and more intuitive and fingers-crossed we aren’t the only ones.

by ashley New on Zistle, Trading, Zistle Updates, zistle love launch, new zistle

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!

by ashley Building Zistle, Features, New on Zistle, Zistle Updates share, view collections

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!

by ashley Building Zistle, Features, New on Zistle, Zistle Updates beta, list view, teams

Holy cow! (yes, sometimes it is painfully obvious that I am from the Midwest) We have received an amazing amount of feedback recently along with some great ideas. There are quite a few things in the pipeline and I want to take a moment to let you know 1. that we have heard you 2. let you know what we are working on next. We really want to build everything at once, but unfortunately we have to prioritize!

Main Site Improvements

1. Performance Enhancements

One of our ongoing goals is to try and make sure that the site is as fast as possible. We have been tracking our performance when we notice that a particular page is taking too long to load.

2. Pretty urls

We have made some pretty urls to make sharing your profile/wantlist/tradelists with others as easy as possible.

Your profile: http://www.zistle.com/username

Your WantList: http://www.zistle.com/username/wantlist

Your TradeList: http://www.zistle.com/username/tradelist

New Features on beta.zistle.com

We test new features on our beta site before launching it to the main site.If you want to try new features before they officially launch, check out beta!

Adding all cards/View settings

Many of our collectors have entire sets (or just missing a few) and some of those sets have over 600 cards in them. So after some helpful feedback, Josh built a feature that allows you to add all cards/remove all cards on your current page. In addition while in list view you can now view 25, 50 or 100 cards at a time. So, adding a base set of 600 cards is now only 6 clicks rather than 600. After a few more days of testing, we will be ready to deploy this feature to the main set.

Update 2/6: This is on the main site as well!

Coming Soon: The Short List

1. Adding Multiple Cards (duplicates) to your collection (Update 2/8: Launched!)

Pretty self explanatory but more complicated than it seems.

2. Adding a card to your WantList while browsing library or collection (Update 2/8: Launched!)

If you see a card you really love while browsing or editing, you will be able to add it instantly.

3. Full Trading Functionality

This deserves its own post. Basically, this is going to be freakin’ awesome.

4. Adding Team as a Card Attribute

This will be a huge feature for team collectors! This will allow you to sort by team. We will need a lot of help from our users to add team information to our cards in the existing database.

Where is my feature idea?

If you have made a suggestion for a feature and it is not listed here, we heard you and added it to our list. The best way to suggest a feature is to go to our feedback page. We respond quickly and keep you updated on the status of your idea. Even if you don’t have an idea, the feedback page is full of great ideas and interesting discussions…check it out!

by ashley New on Zistle, Zistle Updates