1,111,111 Collectibles on Colnect

We are very proud to announce that the items on the Colnect Catalogs have reached the incredible mark of 1,111,111 Collectibles!

This number was reached due the devoted contribution of many good collecting souls that continue to volunteer their time, talent and knowledge to creating and constantly growing the best world collecting community and it's catalogs.

Newly added item to the Stickers Catalog

We would like to express our continued gratitude and appreciation to all those who make Colnect not only possible, but a great environment for collectors, for connecting, exchanging, learning and growing. To all of you, from the Contributors that give the information to the Category Coordinators who process it, from all those who take the time leave Comments to the Editors that review the catalog, to the Translators that make the catalogs available to all worldwide, to all the Forum participants that help divert attention to important details, all of you - thank you. We hope you all see the wonderful outcome of your efforts on the catalogs, and see how your contribution is manifesting itself on Colnect.

Newly added item to the Stamps catalog

Want to take part? Would like to see more items on the catalogs? Missing your country items? Read more about contributing to the Colnect catalogs on our Catalog Contribution Guidelines page. Colnect does not have a Collectible Category you are interested in? Would like to see a new Category on Colnect? See our More Collectibles? page.

Newly added item to the Postcards catalog

Is seems that Progress is contagious, and the growing amount if info on the catalog made other categories accelerate their pace. Recently we have been marking a few catalog mile stones such as 300,303 Stamps and 400,004 Phonecards. The catalogs themselves too decided to raise their numbers, with the recent additions of the Drink Labels, Functional Cards and Video Games categories. Even collectors themselves increased their presence, with (now over) 40,004 collectors.

Newly added item to the Coins catalog

Only in the last month more than 30,000 collectible items were added to the Colnect Catalogs. Every category has it's own pace, it's own style and obstacles. Some category items are harder to get information about, some less, but every category in it's own field is adding impressive amounts of items and enlarging the catalogs by large percents. From categories adding hundreds of items a month to some category raking in thousands and even tens of thousands, all have all the right reasons to be proud and satisfied.

Newly added item to the Video Games catalog

The Story of Colnect

Lately it seemed that one thing was missing in the Colnect story, and that is Colnect itself telling it. Colnect’s active and beautiful community is always telling the story of what Colnect is, but the time has come to type down some official version of how it came to be. So here it goes.

Amir and Frognector climbing the Triund trail at Dharamsala, India

Beginning - The Idea and IPD

or “How an idea, a family and a community grew together”

From son to father, from father to son, from son to brother. It all started when Amir's younger brother, Uri, started collecting phone cards. Soon enough their father, Avi, trying to help out his son with his new hobby, got hooked too. Avi Wald became an avid and dedicated collector. In 2002, Amir's older brother Ofer decided to create a website for their father to encourage him to use the internet more. That is how “Islands Phonecards Database” (IPD) was created. The word of the site spread around to other collectors and they began frequenting it. Amir, coming back from his world travels near the end of 2007, decided to take it on, from a hobby into a serious undertaking.

Amir Wald has made his first steps as a developer at the age of 8. Amir had solely written from scratch a shelf product for an educational company before he turned 18. Amir was involved in numerous software projects of various fields (educational, financial, military, and more) and was thus well-versed in facing new challenges in unknown environments.

The most important changes Amir began with were allowing collectors to directly contribute phonecard information and translate the site online. This approach created a huge potential to exponentially expand the catalog's and site's scope. It proved very effective as more collectors from around the world joined and helped by contributing more collectible card information. Many collectors that joined IPD are today coordinators on Colnect, contributing their time, knowledge and effort to the Colnect catalogs for the benefit of all collectors. Collectors such as Vadym Sulimenko, Ignacio F Lopes Vico, Jens Bruno Wittek stayed with Amir and helped it all happen. Today the list of contributors is growing as well and we owe each and every one of them a big thank you for contributing to the community.

Amir and Frognector are ready for action in Rishikesh, India

Building Colnect - A Chain Reaction

IPD was gaining popularity fast. It wasn't long before it quadrupled the number of its active collectors and continued doubling on. Its collectible phone cards database increased in size and more collectors managed to easily swap cards with collectors from other countries. The success of IPD has motivated Amir to create Colnect.com. Colnect, (Collect + Connect), was created to open up to embrace all collectors of all collectibles everywhere.

Colnect gathered a large, active, attentive, loyal and kind natured community around it. More and more collectible categories were added, from Stamps and Coins, to Tea Bags and Drink Labels.

Avi Wald, 1949-2010

As Colnect grew into a name in the collectors community, it naturally also grew a new face. Frognector, the frog collector, has risen from his humble beginning as Amir’s nephew’s toy, to stardom as Colnect’s beloved green mascot. Frognector was born in 2009, making his first appearance in the StartUp20 competition in Bilbao, Spain, where Colnect won 1st prize. From there on Colnect has gone on to win more competitions such as the TechAviv Peer Awards.

In 2010, Avi Wald, Amir’s father, passed away. He was a devoted collector whose spirit and enthusiasm has inspired and brought about Colnect’s existence. His honest and kind ways will always be remembered, among others, by the many collectors he has gotten to know and exchange with on Colnect. His love and appreciation for knowledge and for the collecting spirit manifests and continues on in the community and workings of Colnect.

Frognector visiting a Buddhist temple in Kunming, China

Colnect Today

Today Colnect is translated into more than 60 languages, visited by over 300,000 unique visitors a month, has over 40,000 registered collectors, has nearly 1 million items cataloged on its 19 online collectible categories, has over 50 million items marked in member's collections and counting. There are always new categories in the works, contributors uploading information and collectors joining from across the globe, from beginners to experienced collecting veterans. The goal is to eventually cover and include the entire collectible world.

In 2011 Amir, as always both the driving power behind Colnect and the fast typing hands operating it, has decided to take himself, Colnect and Frognector with him on the road. Amir has been traveling around the world, all the while developing Colnect, meeting up with collectors, visiting collectors fairs, markets , exhibitions and writing about his experiences.

Frognector getting a kiss at a fountain in Pattaya, Thailand

Looking Forward - The Future of Colnect

The enormous progress Colnect has made so far has only inspired its creator to take it further. The long and prosperous way the Colnect community has made together so far goes to show that Colnect succeeds not only for it's idea or the one who executed it, but also because it is useful. It responds to a need, and it has the ability to fill that need because it is made with and for the community it serves. Colnect is on it’s way to making itself smoother, more comfortable and much more available.

Among the additions in the works are the Colnect MarketPlace, Colnect Applications and Products and Upgrading Colnect’s features and system. Ideas a little further along the way include Colnect Wiki, Colnect Social communications and more.

Automatic Translation of Forums and Private Messages (phpBB)

On all pages of our forum and private messages system, there now is a translation button. Click it to get an automated translation of the entire page you see.



Colnect is available is 58 languages. Translations on Colnect are maintained by volunteers. They do a fantastic job but they cannot translate our forums and your private message. The automated translations will not be as good as the manual ones but they should be good enough to help you understand simple messages.

NOTE: Mistakes do happen with automatic translation. Use simple sentences and try to repeat the meaning of what you want more than once. This will help ensure that the meaning of what you wanted is understood.

So no, we're not building a new Tower of Babel but we're now making it much easier for you to communicate with collectors from all around the world. It's now easier to make friends in more countries with Colnect.

This integration has been done directly in our phpBB forum system and the same concept can easily be applied to forums all around the Internet who would like to use it. If you run such a forum, we'll be happy to help you implement this addition.

Wishing you happy collecting :)

Collectors Visiting Colnect Over 111,111 Times this January

Colnect set new traffic records in January, as over 111,111 visits were made to the site throughout the month, more than a 16.16% increase from December! This milestone reflects Colnect's continued surge in popularity and its strong commitment to expanding the resources available to collectors. January also saw a sharp rise in collector registrations, with a record number of new collectors joining the Colnect community. This recent growth means that 115 countries are now represented by active Colnect members. In addition, the number of Unique Visitors to Colnect jumped more than 17.17% compared with December to over 51,234, while total PageViews increased by over 24.24% to more than 2,727,272. Since Colnect is a unique site, we prefer to use non-round numbers in our reports.

Although this latest news is extremely promising, the development of a truly global community is an ongoing process that requires unyielding effort from both administrators and volunteers. If you have any suggestions or ways to improve the site or would like to help add new items to our catalogs, please don't hesitate to contact us. We are also currently looking for translators to help display Colnect pages in many languages, with the following being of particularly high priority: Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese (especially Traditional script), Hindi, and Punjab.

Google's AdSense for an international website

This is a technical post explaining how to use Google's AdSense on a multiple languages website.

The problem: having a dynamic website that is available in many languages is great but there has to be a way to let AdSense know which languages the user is currently using so relevant ads would appear in that user's language.

Solution: as I've researched the issue for colnect.com (available in 25 languages), it seems the only way to let AdSense know the page's language is by using different URIs for each language. There's currently no way to pass the language as a parameter to the JavaScript responsible for showing the ads.

The following pictures show the same page in different languages. Note that the AdSense ads match the language of the page.

On colnect.com, each link is now prefixed by two letters which signal which language is used. Thus:

http://telecards.colnect.com/fr/browse.php

Refers to a French-language (fr) page while:

http://telecards.colnect.com/es/browse.php

refers to a Spanish-language (es) page.

Calling the relevant PHP script and converting the language prefix to a parameter is easily done using Apache's mod_rewrite.

An important issue I had to address is what happens when one user sends a link or publishes a link. Let's say I know both Spanish and English and prefer to view colnect.com in Spanish. However, perhaps some of my contacts know Hebrew and English but not Spanish. Thus if I send a Spanish-language link to a Hebrew-speaking user, it would be a shame if the site would show up in Spanish and confuse the other person.

To address this issue the language information is saved in the session and the user is redirected to the appropriate link according to his session language. If no session information is found, the language referred to in the link is used. The language is also saved in the user's account so if one logs in using a page in any language, upon a successful log in the language is changed to the previously chosen one

Here's the example (the two letters note the language: es = Spanish, en = English):

If you're visiting the site for the first time, this link will show a Spanish page:

http://telecards.colnect.com/es/browsecoll.php?filter_country=y

Now, if you change the language to English (on the bottom of the side menu - there's a combo-box), you will be redirected to:

http://telecards.colnect.com/en/browsecoll.php?filter_country=y

So now, if you try a Spanish link such as:

http://telecards.colnect.com/es/browsecoll.php?filter_country=y&country=105

You'll automatically be redirected to:

http://telecards.colnect.com/en/browsecoll.php?filter_country=y&country=105

You can change into any of the 25 supported languages and you'll see the AdSense ads now appear in the correct language:

| English | العربية | Български | 汉字 | Hrvatski | Česky | Nederlands | Suomi | Français | Deutsch | Ελληνικά | עברית | Magyar | Italiano | 우리말 | Polski | Português BR | Português PT | Română | Русский | Slovenščina | Español | Svenska | ภาษาไทย | Türkçe |

Hopefully this post gave a sufficient outline to a working solution.