Zistle is currently down and will be for about 15 minutes while we do a little maintenance.

Update:

And we’re back.  Happy Zistlin’.

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!

Well, there is no other way to say it. We made a mistake. A few months ago, we made a change to our back end infrastructure which we thought was a better choice for Zistle. Unfortunately, ever since we switched our service, we have had consistent uptime issues. Tonight, we made a decision to change our infrastructure (yes again) to another hosting platform which we have used in the past without issue.

We are up and running and apologize for the issues today. We are 100% committed to offering you a stable platform. We made a mistake and we admit it. Thanks for your patience as we hustled to get Zistle up on a new platform.

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.

We will be doing some scheduled maintenance this evening and Zistle will be down for a few hours as a result. We expect to start the maintenance at 10pm PST and have it completed by 8am PST 2/26.

Thanks for your patience while we update the system and make Zistle better.

As the NFL season comes to a close, it only makes sense that we give a little love to our Football Collectors. We just added team types to Football to make it easy to find your favorite team. So far, we have added the NFL, NCAA, CFL, UFL and AFL as well as some of the experimental but now defunct leagues including the USFL, NFL Europe, the World Leage of American Football and of course the XFL.

Like other sports, there is an inactive category for currently operating leagues to avoid confusion. We have also added years to help ensure that you pick the right team. If you have a team type that isn’t listed, feel free to add it to the miscellaneous type and we can create a new team type for you.

Hockey team types are live on Zistle. For starters, we have included the NHL, now defunct WHA, the AHL, IHL, Elitserien, Allsvenskan, Kontinental Hockey League (Russia) as well as some junior leagues: OHL, WHL and the QMJHL. We also added a World category for international teams that compete in various international match-ups (e.g. the Olympics).

If there are some team types need to be added right away – let us know. Our plan is to have as close to a comprehensive list as possible.

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 are currently working on launching the new Zistle. The site will be up and sunning in roughly 24-48 hours depending on the migration of the data from the old site to the new site. Thanks for your patience!

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.