It is that time again. This is a teaser post about how great Zistle will be with the next release. Trading is a particularly painful topic because frankly, our trading tool is just crap right now. A big focus for us in this release is simply making trading work. This was my original draft of the trading sneak peek post:

Trading. It works. The end.

Stop reading if that is all you care about. If you’re interested in a glimpse of the new system, then read on.

Trade Proposals: New look and feel

The actual process for trading is very similar to our current system (again, focusing on it actually working). One major improvement is the appearance of the trading tool. When you initiate a trade with a Zistle member, you will be brought to a page that displays your trade matches (cards you want that are also on their tradelist).

Similarly to our current system, you can also browse their tradelist in case there are cards that you don’t have on your wantlist. However, you can also browse their collection in case there are cards you want that are not on their tradelist.

Editing the proposal and trade history

After the initial proposal is sent, you can add messages or edit the proposal as many times as necessary until you come to an agreement (you can also reject the trade if it isn’t working out). All of these updates to the proposal are saved as part of the trade history.

Rate trade and automatically add cards to collection

Once both members have accepted the terms of the trade, the trade is pending until you receive the cards in the mail. Once you receive the cards, you can rate the trade and automatically add the cards to your collection.

The trade isn’t complete until both parties receive their cards and rate the trade. Trade rating allows you to build a good trade reputation on Zistle.

Ultimately, we’re really excited that trading is going to work and look as good as the rest of the site. The next post is going to focus on improvements that we’ve made to make finding trading partners easier.

One of the great things about Zistle is that it is easy to share search-able versions of your collection, tradelist and wantlist with other people online. However, there has been some confusion on how to do this so we thought a quick reminder would be helpful.

Linking to your collection: www.zistle.com/username

For example, my username on Zistle is Ashley. So if I want to post a link to my collection it is simply: www.zistle.com/ashley

Linking to a specific collection: http://www.zistle.com/username/collections/sport_name

We also allow you to create a link to a specific sports collection. If I wanted to do this with my Football collection for example, it would be http://www.zistle.com/ashley/collections/football.

Linking to your wantlist: http://www.zistle.com/username/wantlist

Linking to your tradelist: http://www.zistle.com/username/tradelist

If you currently post your collection on a forum or your blog, it may be worth it to double check your link to make sure that it is correct. Thanks for making Zistle awesome as always.

We are excited to announce that we now have better search functionality for wantlists and tradelists. You can now search wantlist and tradelists – your own as well as other members’ lists. To search your wantlist, make sure that you select your wantlist on the left navigation menu on your dashboard. The type any search terms in the search box above the lists and you can instantly search.

You can also search other member’s wantlists, tradelists and collections by going to their profile page www.zistle.com/username and selecting their wantlist/tradelist or collection and search. This should help make trading a little easier in the future.

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.

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.

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.

I have been neglecting our blog. It is true and I am deeply, deeply ashamed. But, I have a really good reason.  Josh and I have been completely glued to our computers getting ready to launch the next release of Zistle and I haven’t been able to tear myself away. But tonight I am making myself take a breather to share a preview of the new Zistle.

I know what you’re thinking…the new Zistle? Isn’t Zistle pretty new? Why do you need a new version?

Our current site is really just a prototype that was never intended to be the final product. As many of you know, we have been making gradual improvements to the functionality of the site, mainly in response to your feedback and suggestions. Next, we set out to tackle our trading platform, which allows you to propose and negotiate detailed trades with other Zistle members based on the contents of your WantList/TradeList. It didn’t take us long to realize that building the trading platform meant that almost every area of the site needed to be optimized. Launching our trading functionality was going to have a huge impact and rather than having several small releases, we decided to roll it out in one big release. So here is what you will see when the new Zistle launches.

1. New Look

With the new release, there will be major changes to the overall design of the site. When redesigning the site, we wanted to highlight the beauty of the cards, make the navigation more straightforward and add advanced options while maintaining the simplicity of the site. Plus, some areas just needed a little polish. We also intend on launching LOTS of new sports–more to come on this later.

2. Trading Platform

The trading platform is the major new feature of this release. With our new trading platform, you will be able to search for trading partners based on their WantLists/TradeLists, offer card for card proposals (I will trade you these 15 cards for those 15 cards), and counter offer until an agreement is reached. Each trade negotiation has its own page and stores the history of the proposal. Once the trade is complete, you can rate the trade and all cards will automatically be entered into your collection. It is going to be really, really sweet.

3.  Overall Optimized Experience

Almost every single aspect of the site is getting an upgrade. The dashboard, your collection experience, the library homepage, trading (of course), box breaks. We can’t possibly fit everything that we want to do in the next release but we are trying to make it as awesome as we can. If there is anything that you absolutely cannot live without in the next release, please post it in the comments and we will do our best to include it.

I cannot give an absolute date that we will be launching the next version but we are planning on mid-March at the latest. We hope it is sooner and we work fast but there is still a lot of work to do.

You have been amazing in using the site, giving feedback, sharing your scans and most of all sharing your passion for this great hobby. You deserve the best site that we can provide and we are determined to give it to you.

It is Valentine’s Day which means that most people are thinking about a different type of cardboard–the type that tells loved ones you love them and/or the cardboard boxes that contain chocolates. Not us! We celebrated Valentine’s day early by heading to the local card shop and buying a box of fresh wax for each other. But it doesn’t stop there. All weekend, we are going to be working on cranking out some great new features for our loyal members because we really love you guys. Here is what we have lined up for our weekend of Zistle love.

Teams! As I write this, Josh is building the infrastructure to add teams. The lists will start with current professional teams but you will be able to add old teams, minor league teams, college teams, etc… We think we have come up with a pretty great solution for adding team to a card quickly as well as adding new teams. Just like adding a new set, a new team will have to be approved before users can see it. This has been a popular feature request and we are excited to launch it.

Layout improvements: Adding teams has forced us to reconsider our layout in list view. We are improving the layout to be able to see more cards at a time in gallery view as well as be able to see the team in list view.

Trading! This is a behemoth of a project which we plan to make a huge dent in this weekend. We are working hard to get this functionality to you. We definitely need people to beta test this for us. We’ll let you know as soon as it is live!

Other Bug Fixes/Improvements: You will definitely see some small updates as well. For example, some improvements/changes to adding cards, the ability to flag sets/subsets and the ability to add a box to the box break page.