Colnect, Connecting Collectors. Colnect offers revolutionizing services to Collectors the world over. Colnect is available in 63 languages and offers extensive collectible catalogs and the easiest personal collection management and Auto-Matching for deals. Join us today :)
Michael Jackson's recent death seemed to have affected many people around the globe. Surely a celebrity of great magnitude, as you can see there are phone cards where Michael Jackson appears on Colnect. Interestingly enough, no stamps or coins were issued with him. Any idea why?
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
Colnect has been said of having an ugly user interface that doesn't fit the cool Web2.0 scene. So in the last week I've been working on many usability issues trying to improve how collectors interact with Colnect. To compliment these additions a new welcome page now greets new comers. Below these pictures you'll find what has really changed lately.
Natural sorting is not straight forward on computer system. When sorting the numbers 1 to 10, too many computer programs will start with 1 10 2 instead of the natural 1 2 3. As natural sorting is not supported by the database, I sought different options for sorting catalog codes which may be anything like P-11b, XPK-987-33, Km#12.11 and whichever combination you may consider. So what is currently done is that all numbers are padded with spaces to some set length and so the database knows how to sort them properly. Don't worry, it's not the original information just a copy of it used for quick searching and sorting.
Another issue now settled is that of searching by 'Name'. This was my mistake to begin with as 'Name' on coin countries list, for example, would search a country name and on the main coins page would search a coin name. Now proper pages would have both "Coin name" and "Country name" search so prevent confusion.
A few duplicate catalogs and duplicate series have been merged using a newly duplicates processing script which would make it easy for editors to report such duplicates and process them.
On the multiple-language front an important change has been made. A user that has never visited Colnect will now have his default language according to his country (conferred by the IP address). That is, of course, if it's one of the 35 languages supported by Colnect. Once a user sets a different language, it's remembered and all subsequent URLs would contain the language letters. So even if a German-speaking collector send a /de/ URL to his Spanish-speaking friend, it'll be converted to /es/ for the Spanish-speaker.
And finally, a new improved welcome page is supposed to make more sense than the previous one. Yes, usability and design have to be re-thought and re-made on Colnect but there's nothing quite as bad as a horrible first impression, so here we go...
Google has announced Page Speed, a FireFox add-on that will help optimizing your website. Obviously competing with Yahoo's YSlow tool, it's worth it to check out what Google think their do better and help further optimizing Colnect Collectors Community.
A funny first thing I've noticed was the comments Page Speed gave on its own guide page. Maybe it's time for Google to start using their tool ;)
A previous post about Colnect's ratings on Alexa had been posted about 4 months ago. Colnect's Alexa ratings had kept climbing through the time and now standing at ~103,000, whereas ~4 months ago it was ~184,000, ~7 months ago it was at ~360,000 and ~9 months ago ~500,000. Climbing up from now on will probably be slower on the absolute numbers but not on the actual traffic which keeps growing and growing as Colnect is offering its services to new crowds of banknotes collectors and bottle caps collectors.
Banknotes are now available on Colnect and collectors from around the world can manage their personal collection using the catalog offered on Colnect, already with over 15,000 banknotes.
New categories can be added to Colnect and if you're a collector of any mass-produced collectible you are most welcomed to help and add your favorite collectibles.
Over a hundred collectors have helped out to create Colnect's catalogs.
Colnect's phonecards catalog is the world's most extensive, currently with ~157,000 phone cards listed. Colnect's coins catalog is the world's biggest free coins catalog, currently with ~15,000 coins. Colnect's stamps catalog is growing quickly and already has over 68,000 stamps listed. Colnect's new bottle caps catalog already has ~5,400 bottle caps listed.
Bottle caps are now available on Colnect and collectors from around the world can manage their personal collection using the catalog offered on Colnect.
Colnect's catalogs are created by volunteering collectors and updated constantly. The initial catalog of bottle caps, already with over 5,000 bottle caps, has been contributed by one member of Colnect, Paul Giba.
More categories will soon be added to Colnect and if you're a collector of any mass-produced collectible you are most welcomed to help and add your favorite collectibles.
Over a hundred collectors have helped out to create Colnect's catalogs.
Colnect's phonecards catalog is the world's most extensive, currently with over 155,000 phone cards listed. Colnect's coins catalog is the world's biggest free coins catalog, currently with over 14,000 coins. Colnect's stamps catalog is growing quickly and already has over 68,000 stamps listed.
Colnect had surprisingly won the Startup2.0 competition in Bilbao, Spain. Out of ~160 companies, 11 made it to the finals where each company had 3 minutes to pitch and 4 more minutes for Q&A. This post will describe what I consider the key points that have made Colnect's pitch stand out and perhaps one of the reasons for Colnect winning the competition.
Planning
Perhaps 3 minutes don't seem like a lot of time but consider that some "elevator pitches" last only 40 seconds, so 3 minutes is a lot. In my opinion, a major mistake is to try and showcase all you have in a short amount of time. When time is of the essence the aim is to impress. So the initial plan was to use the 3 minutes to give a basic introduction and impress the audience without getting into any details. Considering the fact that 11 companies were going to display, Colnect would have to stand out.
Promotional Video
If you haven't watched it yet, you should now:
The idea to use puppets for the video came from my brother Ofer and help in creating the video came from my friend Matan and his friend Eric.
Impressive key points were emphasized in the video: * Colnect's availability in 35 languages. * Colnect having a great community with over a hundred volunteers. * Colnect answering a real need for collectors - its target market.
Q&A
Intentionally, I have not answered the most common questions (business model, current status, competition, etc.) in my 3 minutes part. I guessed that it would mean I'd get to be asked these questions rather than (potentially hazardous) unexpected questions or (much worse) no questions. Detailed answers to the common questions were prepared and I could use my "cheat sheet" in answering the jury's questions.
As a minor gimmick, I put on the frog puppet (Frognector) from the video on my hand while the video was being watched and as the video finished showing, I opened with: "Frognector is now available to answer your questions". I actually expected a bit more laughs but I'm sure it attracted attention to myself. Some of the jury members were using their laptops paying half (or less) attention on other presentations. My "bending the rules" a bit ensured more attention. Though I risked being seen as a joker, I believed that the ready made answers would make up for any such impression.
Aftermath
Not that a good presentation would necessarily take you where you want to go but a bad presentation will most likely NEVER take you where you want. Try to think who your target crowd is and how they would look at it. For example: when doing a 1on1 meeting the gimmicks may be completely stupid but when you need to stand out from the rest, they're probably essential.
An astounding surprise, Colnect has won Statrup2.0 competition held as a part of the nonick conference in Bilbao, Spain.
Startup2.0 featured ~160 companies from all over Europe, of which 11 companies made it to the finals. All members of the jury unanimously voted for Colnect! The greatness of the achievement is even more vivid in the light of the grave difference between Colnect and most other contenders. Colnect has never received any funding and has been run solely by its single founder, Amir Wald, also writing this post.
Second place went to Genoom from Spain, a social networking platform designed to build private family networks. Third place went to Twidox from Germany, a free, user generated library of ‘quality’ documents that allows individuals and organizations to easily publish, distribute, share, and discover them.
Colnect was chosen as one of the finalists to compete on Startup 2.0 competition to be held 24-25/April in Bilbao, Spain.
This year, 157 start ups participated, of which 11 were chosen to present in Bilbao. Three of those will win by a jury's decision. Though I believe Colnect is an extremely unique, interesting and useful project, its lack of any external funding may make it a little rough of the edges and so I'm lowering my expectations (though not my enthusiasm) in advance. Not many stay awestruck and drooling when seeing the intelligent special girl walking on the beach, most reserve their saliva for the fit hottie in bikini ;)
From their site: " Startup2.0 is a competition of European web 2.0 sites whose objectives are to promote and reward the European startups (either created or willing to do so in the future) that work in the field of 2.0 technologies."
A previous post here was showing problems occurring by PayPal's inability to receive UTF-8 encoding. Although I still consider it a major PayPal fault, it may be possible to override this bug by setting your site's encoding on your PayPal account. When you find the 'Edit Profile' link under 'Account' tab when logged in, there should be a link to change your language encoding. It's not very noticeable but it's there. I haven't tested it and prefer not to use non-English alphabet in the value part of the input.
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...
Using Colnect's catalog, collectors from around the world can easily manage their personal collection on Colnect and find swap buddies from around the world.
So you got your PayPal merchant account for your awesome website and have created a nice button to allow members to receive the amazing premium paid services you've made for them. You create the button code using the wizard supplied on PayPal's site to ensure nothing goes wrong. Oh, your site is multilingual? Yes, so please create another button for every language. No, we cover only some of those on your site. PayPal hasn't enough resources to translate itself to all popular languages. It's probably not making as much money as Colnect that can afford to be translated to 35 languages.
So the button is on the site and you test it. It works. Hurray! That wasn't too hard. But hey, are you going to test each option on the button in each language? Yes, you should but it seems fine and PayPal is a serious website. Right? WRONG!
A member who tries to pay money is faced with this beautiful message: "PayPal cannot process this transaction because of a problem with the seller's website. Please contact the seller directly to resolve this problem."
Though you might expect PayPal to alert you when such an event happens that is obviously your fault, it never happens. You may keep wondering how much business you've lost due to this fuck up. Well, you made the mistake so you suffer the consequences. Right? WRONG!
The problem is that PayPal's server has some problem with unicode encoding. You have used the Euro sign and dared send it to their server. Your site has a problem. You have a problem. Don't you know that Euro signs are bad? The wizard that generated your code thought of letting you know it but than decided you should learn it the hard way. The hard way would be to go through technical support with a person who obviously doesn't know very much about all the relevant Internet technologies and tells you it's your fault again. It's your page header, it's your CSS (WTF?!?!), it's your bad browser cookies.
You finally create another button without the Euro sign and find out that it wasn't you after all. It was them. It is them. PayPal screwed it up. But it's your fault, you chose to use their services...
The author of this post is not affiliated with PayPal or any other similar service. The story is true. I keep being amazed at how unprofessional PayPal is. Your comments welcomed.
The reason I'm not going to write "PayPal sucks" is probably because they seem to be somewhat better than the competition when it comes to receiving payments from around the world in a secure way. I do plan on trying MoneyBookers as well and it seems that other competitors either take hefty fees (WorldPay want 200GBP set-up fee...) and/or are limited in currencies and countries of availability.
* Fees. Though almost anywhere on their site they publish the fees to be up to 3.4%, a closer examination reveals 3.9% for "cross-border" transactions (I'm sure the guy who made that bs up got a great bonus afterwards) plus a good 2.5% spread on currency conversion. So we're getting to 6.3% WITHOUT mentioning the fee per transaction and withdrawl fee.
* Support. My worst support experiences ever. Customer support first reply was always automated and faintly related to the question. Subsequent replies were never helpful. Technical support was lacking technical knowledge and misdirected me more than helping.
* Site Usability. They could have done a much better job at that. Navigation is horrible and sessions often expire. Many times I got sporadic server errors.
For the finishing paragraph I'll write the good things: setup was relatively painless and PayPal is popular and thus consumers feel secure using it.
Web crawlers, or search bots, are very popular beasts of the Internet. They allow your site to be automatically scanned and indexed. The main advantage is that people may find your site through these indexes and visit your site. The main disadvantages is that your content is copied somewhere else (where you have no control over it) and that the bots take your server resources and bandwidth.
On my site for collectors, I have created a pretty extensive robots.txt file to prevent some nicer bots from scanning parts of the site they shouldn't and blocking semi-nice bots. In addition, server rules to block some less than nice bots out there were added.
The biggest problem left unanswered is what to do when the supposedly nice bots attack your site. The web's most-popular bots is probably GoogleBot, create and operated by Google. Obviously, it brings traffic and is a good bot that should be allowed to scan the site. However, more and more frequently I see that the bot is looking for more and more URLs that NEVER existed on the site. Atop of that, since the site supports 35 languages, the bot even made up language-specific URLs. For some reason, it decided I should have a /en/phone page and so it also tries to fetch /es/phone, de/phone and so on.
So why is that so annoying? Two main reasons:
1/ It appears in my logs. I check these for errors and end up spending time on it. 2/ The bot is not giving up on these URLs although a proper 404 code is returned. It tries them over and over and over and over again.
Any suggestions? Seems to me that modifying robots.txt with 35 new URLs each time GoogleBot makes up a URL isn't the easiest solution.
The problem is not unique to GoogleBot. I have completely blocked Alexa's ia_archiver which is making up URLs like crazy.
Are there any reasons for inventing NEVER-existing URLs? Probably broken HTML files or invalid links from somewhere. Sometimes, wrong interpretation of JavaScript code (do they really HAVE TO follow every nofollow link as well???) seems to be the reason.
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.
