The time has come for a style guide. We cannot wait any longer. While approving the flagged cards this evening, I noticed that there are some flagging wars over how to label a card. We need come to a consensus on a few things so that we don’t have people wasting their time flagging endlessly. As we continue to grow, it is important that we have guidelines to help our database to be as accurate as possible.

Since I anticipate this will be a little messy, I am going to be writing a series of  posts about issues that I am seeing over and over again. Please, Please, PLEASE help us by giving feedback in our comments so that we can come to some consensus over these issues. As we reach decisions, I will be adding them to the Zistle Style Guide which will be housed on the Zistle site.

Here is the first list of topics: determining what is a set and what is a subset, the number of a card, multiplayer cards, short prints, team checklists, and named cards (different from payer name), and unnumbered cards.

Please let me know in the comments if you have other suggestions for additional topics. I know there are others out there so just let me know. I am working on the set/subset post now and it should be ready soon. Thanks for participating and I am looking forward to seeing how this works.

Hey everyone. Our apologies for not being very responsive the last week or so. We just moved from Seattle to Minneapolis and we are just now getting settled in. Thanks so much for your patience and understanding.

We have had problems getting our internet up and running consistently so it will take us some time before we can get any updates out. We have been reading your feedback and trying to approve cards as fast as we can–you guys have been busy. We would love to hear from you about what you think should be included in the next release either on our feedback page or by email (ashley@zistle.com). We have a lot of projects coming up but if you think we need something right away, please let us know.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Before I talk about the new sports we will be adding to Zistle, I would like to say thanks to Dan from CheapSeatSaints. Not only is he a rockstar contributor to Zistle, but he even has been scanning the wantlists and saw that I needed some cards to complete my Allen and Ginter base set, so he sent them my way. Thanks Dan!

And many more….

Ashley and I have recently been working hard to start integrating other sport cards into Zistle, but we have run into a slight problem. Baseball card information is easy to find, so it was easy to bootstrap the experience and get a lot of card information into Zistle without asking the users to do it all by hand. The “Other” sports card collectors have been historically under-served and we think that Zistle can help, however, there is a chicken and egg problem, wherein it is tough to start serving them because we can’t find the information! So what can you guys do to help? Just let us know if there are communities, collectors, encyclopedias or anything else out there that we might be able to leverage to help the Zistle encyclopedia grow. We have already been contacted by some extremely helpful collectors in the soccer card space, but if you know of anything that we might not be leveraging, let us know.

Thanks again for all of your hard work. We appreciate it.

Photo Credit: Robert Holmgren

You may be wondering where in the (fill in the blank) we have been hiding. We have officially crawled out from under the rock we have been hiding under and promise things will be back to normal. We are hard at work on getting the next version of Zistle up and running and you should be able to check it out very, very soon.

Thanks to everyone for your kind words and  thoughts and of course your understanding. A special thanks for continuing to work on Zistle while we were away. Seeing all the cards that were being added to the library really lifted our spirits and gave us something to look forward to. You guys are awesome and we are really excited to be back in action.

Josh and I have been slow to respond lately because we have been in Minnesota dealing with a family emergency. We have seen all the great work everyone has been doing and we are anxious to get back to work on Zistle but we will still be a little distracted the next few days. Thanks so much for your kind thoughts and understanding during this tough time. Feel free to email us or leave feedback and we will get back to you as soon as we can.