Editing Collectors: Improved Interface

Colnect's wiki-like collectibles catalogs are growing quickly with the assistance off volunteering contributing collectors who send information missing in the catalogs and volunteering editing collectors (or simply "editors") who make the actual changes to the catalogs, guaranteeing their quality .

The editing interface used by the editors is very simple. A small editing icon is present near all fields they can edit and by clicking it a window pops up which allows them to set the new value. Every item edited generated an immediate tweet on @ColnectEdits. Seems that due to the volume of edits, Twitter no longer indexes any tweets by @ColnectEdits.



An important improvement of the interface has just been announced and accepted with enthusiasm by some the editors. Using JavaScript, the page is no longer reloaded after each edit. It's a simple change but saves editors a lot of time and thus encourages them to do more edits. As it's not so complex to implement, I wonder why much great endeavors than Colnect, such as WikiPedia have not yet something similar (or better).

Collectibles tweets with Twitter

Updates done on Colnect may be found on Twitter. For all collectibles added to Colnect see @ColnectCatalogs. For all edits done by our editors see: @ColnectEdits. General news are sometimes posted on @Colnect but this blog you are reading is more in-depth.

Do you have a Twitter account? Would you like automated tweets in your account about favorite collectibles? Send a direct message to @Colnect

Invalid URL Requests From Legitimate Bots

In a former post I've mentioned that I have no idea how come invalid URLs for which no link on the site (nor sitemap) exists are being tried by legitimate bots such as GoogleBot.

Now I have a partial answer for the non existing URLs presented in the post. Some time ago, a twitter account for Colnect editors has been opened @ColnectEdits. It automatically twits about edits done on Colnect's catalogs so that other collectors may track it.



An interesting thing that you can see in the attached picture is the the links generated by the tweets are shown as http://colnect.com/en/phone... but actually do link to the correct full URLs, such as http://colnect.com/en/phonecards/item/id/9212. So it seems that the web crawlers read both as legitimate URLs and try to fetch them. Since it seems GoogleBot does not want to learn that /en/phone returns 404 from Colnect, I am now forced to add these as legitimate URLs to my site to avoid seeing more 404s in my logs. Oh well...

Twitter fails as a promotional tool?

Colnect has joined Twitter less than a week ago using a few Twitter profiles:
* Colnect news Twitter @colnect
* A personal Twitter for Colnect's manager @AmirWald
* Automated feed reporting new collectibles in Colnect's catalogs @ColnectCatalogs
* Automated feed on Colnect's catalog edits @ColnectEdits

During these days 28 visits came to Colnect from Twitter, a meager amount in comparison to the number of "followers" and energy invested. The bounce rate (visitors seeing a single page and leaving the site) was incredibly high as well. In comparison, a few posts on a relevant forum resulted in hundreds of relevant visits (with much lesser bounce rate).

It seems a lot of people use Twitter to self promote and so it's more of a bubble where "followers" is a rough indication of the number of people who will actually read anything of what you write. My guess is that for most people, a small percent of their "followers" actually read more than 5% of their tweets. Though some people think of it as a useful personal tool, it doesn't seem like they dominate Twitter.

Though less than a week may be a too short amount of time for a verdict, results so far are very unsatisfying. In the future, the automated feeds may be of use to some of the addict collectors on Colnect. Let's see what the future brings.

Colnect on Twitter

Giving up to the fad? Possibly...
Easier than blog posts? Obviously...
Useful? hmmm.....

Anyway, you're welcomed to follow the official Colnect on Twitter
All public updates regarding Colnect may be there before anywhere else.