Colnect advertising on TechCrunch - the results

As promised previously, this post will reveal the results of Colnect's advertising on TechCrunch.

A short reminder: a couple of months ago, Colnect, a unique website for collectors, has won the Startup2.0 competition in Spain. The prize chosen was an advertisement space on TechCrunch, a world known technology blog. Revealing Colnect's results may perhaps assist those who wish to make a decision on whether or not advertising on TechCrunch would be beneficial to their business.

Horrible Service
Based on our email correspondence:
* It took 1.5 months (!!!) for TechCrunch to start running Colnect's ad although it was told that they'll run it as soon as they get it. A fair share of emails were sent throughout that time and got royally ignored.
* It was told the the ads rotate randomly. The ads on TechCrunch do not rotate randomly. Either something is broken on the ad system or it's intentional. I checked hundreds of pages showing ads (at different times) and Colnect's ad never appeared on the top two rows (out of 5 rows). When repeatedly asked about it, the only answer was that they'll get back to me on it. As a compensation, they ran my ad an extra week and again promised an answer. However, until now no such answer has been received.

The Results
One last important note before revealing the results. Colnect is a unique website for collectors and TechCrunch is a technology blog. A tech-related ad on TechCrunch would probably have faired better.

Colnect's ad ran for 2 weeks and, according to Google Analytics, resulted in 800 visits with a really high bounce rate (visits that leave the site after one page) of 58%. According to my server stats there have been 1,319 total clicks on Colnect's ad coming from 990 distinct IP addresses.

Feel free to comment here if you have any questions.

Collecting Tea Bags? Colnect presents the world's first Tea Bags catalog for collectors

Tea Bags are now available on Colnect and collectors from around the world can manage their personal collection using the catalog offered on Colnect.

If you're a tea bags collector, have friends who collect tea bags or are just curious about this unique collectible, feel welcomed to browse Colnect's online wiki catalog for tea bags - the world's first!

Colnect's catalogs are created by volunteering collectors and updated constantly. Our world-unique catalog of tea bags, already with over 500 tea bags, has been contributed by one member of Colnect, Carine De Pauw [crookscarine].

Any mass-produced collectibles that collectors frequently swap, but and sell are most welcomed on Colnect and you can easily add your favorite collectibles category.

Currently, 116 collectors have already helped out to create Colnect's catalogs.

Colnect's phone card catalog is the world's most extensive, currently with over 191,000 phone cards listed! Colnect's coin catalog is the world's biggest free coins catalog, presenting over 16,000 coins. Colnect's stamp catalog is growing quickly and already has over 74,000 stamps listed. Our extensive banknote catalog lists over 16,000 banknotes and our bottle cap catalog has recently grown to nearly 11,000 bottle caps.

5,555 Collectors on Colnect

Colnect's community has been growing very nicely recently and we're now 5,555 collectors, coming from 88 countries and using Colnect in 38 languages. Less than a month ago Colnect has passed the 5,000 collectors mark and so we're experiencing a growth of over 11% in a month!

Colnect enables collectors to easily manage their personal collection and coordinate swaps ans sales. Many collectors choose to display their collections on Colnect and so you can easily see our active Stamp collectors, Coin collectors, Banknote collectors, Bottle Cap collectors and Phonecard collectors.

In addition to Colnect's unique services to collectors, it offers relevant social networking features to allow members to communicate, become friends, rate each other and more.

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).

Bottle Caps Catalog - Doubled in Size!

During the last few days, Colnect's bottle cap catalog has doubled its size. There are currently nearly 11,000 bottle caps listed. Many thanks go to Art Zhitnik who has contributed the information based on his own bottle cap collection. Art has created a bottle cap cataloging software, Caps Navigator, which allows bottle cap collectors to create their own database. Due to his organized contribution to Colnect, other collectors will be able to use the pictures and information to easily manage their personal collection on Colnect.

Since the information is of Art's own collection, editors on Colnect will now work on "merging" duplicate items. It's a very common task on Colnect's wiki-catalogs since it happens that some items are accidentally added more than once. When two items are "merged", the inventory information is kept. So, for example, if a collector marked either of the items on his wish list, the "merged" item will be on his wish list.

Cheating Collectors NOT Welcomed on Colnect

As much as I dislike getting involved in disputes among collectors on Colnect, it is sometimes inevitable. Cheaters are a big problem and I believe that with keeping to some simple rules, frauds can be minimized. For the reason I have created the Swapping Tips page ~3 weeks ago.

Here are some recent changes to Colnect meant to reduce the number of cheaters:

• The list of collectors with negative ratings has now been made public.
• A link to the Swapping Tips page has been added on relevant profile and ratings pages.
• Added a link to the side menu: Forums / Warnings.

Collectors List Improvements

A long awaited fix to Colnect's collectors list has finally been implemented. As collectors on Colnect may collect different types of collectibles, it's important to see who collects what. The collectors list (see below) now shows it clearly.



In addition, an easy-to-use pop-up selection now allows to filter by collectors of a certain collectible, for example coin collectors or stamp collectors.

Colnect advertising on TechCrunch

Do you want to know how effective advertising on TechCrunch is?

A few months ago, Colnect has won the Startup2.0 competition in Spain. The prize chosen was an advertisement space on TechCrunch, a world known technology blog.

Though it took way too long time (most of which was not my fault), the following ad is now finally displayed:



It will run for a week (started 2 days ago) and I will report how many clicks on it were made. This information may be interesting for those considering advertising on TechCrunch, as it's seemingly quite expensive in comparison to Google's AdWords.

Colnect has sitelinks on Google

Google sitelinks are links shown under some sites in a search results page.

Colnect now finally has sitelinks as the following image shows:



To see how it looks now, simply Google: Colnect.

They are supposed to be somewhat helpful in convincing users to click on one of your results and so that's good news for Colnect. I'd like to accredit it to some recent SEO efforts I've made but the truth is one never really knows...

The odd thing is how these links are chosen by Google's "automatic" process. The words chosen for quicklinks are "Stamps", "Phonecards", "Countries" and "Monedas".
The first two seem a perfect choice as they frequently appear on Colnect and are really a part of what the site is all about. The last two are quite a weird twist of Google's algorithm as "Countries" actually refers to the Banknote catalog - countries list on Colnect and the second one goes to the Spanish version of the coins page, rather than the English one.

Any tips on how their "automatic" algorithm works and how I could optimize for it would be appreciated. Until then, I am, as most, at the mercy of the Google gods.

Collectors on Colnect - over 5,000

Colnect Colnect has passed the mark of 5,000 registered collectors. This is an increase of over 45% from 5 months ago. Considering the lack of true marketing efforts, it is an impressive achievement.

How do collectors learn about Colnect?

As Colnect allows collectors to manage their personal collection and semi-automatically manage swaps with other collectors from around the world, it's the collectors' own interest to have their collector friends join the site. Why would a collector go through the swap and wish lists of another collector manually when a match to his own lists can be done with a click?

So what's next?

Colnect will expand to more collectible fields as requests come from existing members of the community. There are currently already 5 categories (stamps, coins, paper money, phone cards and bottle caps) and a few more are now being worked on by collectors.
Additional services, most of which were requested by the community, are being implemented and will soon be announced.

Happy collecting :)

The World's Biggest Phone Card Catalog lists over 186,000 phone cards

Happy to announce that Colnect's phone cards catalog, the world's most-extensive phone card catalogs, has now over 186,000 phone cards listed in it.

Amazingly, the catalog keeps growing faster than before, with over 27,000 phone card listed during the last 30 days. By the time you read this post the number 186,000 may already be obsolete.

Colnect's catalog is an endeavor of many collectors from all over the world who constantly work improve it.

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.

Special thanks goes to all the contributors, editors and translators of Colnect.

Happy collecting :)

Google Follows Colnect and Takes off the BETA

In a previous post about what beta means, I've shared my opinion about Google abusing the BETA mark as to render it almost meaningless, as their example was followed by many other companies in the industry. I've decided that Colnect will not follow and remove its BETA mark as the system became widely used by real users.

Now it seems that Google decided to follow Colnect's way and remove the BETA: "We're taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk to remove any doubt that Apps is a mature product suite.".

Yes Google, it's about time!

To those who didn't follow the humor, I doubt it that the post on Colnect's blog made the difference to Google but it's funnier to think that it did :)

Michael Jackson's Death - Will More Collectibles Be Issued?

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?

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

Collectors Welcomed - A New Welcome Page on Colnect + Usability Issues

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 Page Speed vs. Yahoo YSlow

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 ;)

Colnect's Alexa Ratings goes up up up...

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 and Bottle Caps Google Gadgets

Do you see the random collectibles on the side of this blog? These are Colnect's iGoogle gadgets.

Following the recent addition of banknotes and bottle caps to Colnect, the matching Google Gadgets, showing a random collectible, are now available.




They can easily be added to your iGoogle page, blog or website using following URIs.

Banknotes:
http://colnect.com/integrations/google_gadget/collectibles/banknotes

Bottle Caps:
http://colnect.com/integrations/google_gadget/collectibles/bottlecaps

The previous gadgets are also available:

Coins:
http://colnect.com/integrations/google_gadget/collectibles/coins

Stamps:
http://colnect.com/integrations/google_gadget/collectibles/stamps

Phone Cards:
http://colnect.com/integrations/google_gadget/collectibles/phonecards

Banknotes for Collectors on Colnect

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.

Collectible Bottle Caps for Collectors on Colnect

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.

How Colnect's Winning Pitch Was Made

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.

Colnect wins Startup2.0 competition!!! nonick 2009, Bilbao, Spain

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.

Official announcements are found here and here.

Colnect's new promotional video, created for the competition, was met with spontaneous ovation from the crowd. Here it is:


Colnect's founder, Amir Wald, receiving the award:


More personal notes about the event will soon be published. Thanks to everyone organizing, participating and supporting Colnect.

Colnect got the the finals on Startup 2.0 2009

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."

UPDATE: The finalists announced here

Paypal + Unicode - part 2

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.



Good luck :)

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...

Phone cards catalog: biggest, most extensive, free

Happy to announce that Colnect's phone cards catalog, the world's most-extensive phone cards catalogs, has now over 150,000 phone cards listed in it.

Colnect's catalog is an endeavor of many collectors from around the world who constantly improve it.

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.

Special thanks goes to all the contributors, editors and translators of Colnect.

Happy collecting :)

PayPal + Unicode ==> No Payment

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.

PayPal Opinion

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.

So here's are some of the problems of PayPal for my website for collectors:

* 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.

When Web Crawlers Attack

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.

2009/04/15 - Read the update

Colnect Rising on Compete

Though I update about trends in site metrics for Colnect, I'm not really sure what they mean as they don't always coincide with my Analytics results. You're welcomed to check Colnect's rankings on Compete. It has risen 34% in the last month. Pretty nice :)

GMail turn 5 - still BETA??? Colnect will not follow.

Gmail's official blog announced that Gmail celebrates it's 5th birthday. 5 years is not a short amount of time. However, GMail is still in BETA. It seems that Google has changed the common meaning of "BETA" from "publicly available product about to go fully public when final fixes and additions are made" into "fully fledged public product that is expected to sometimes fail and we won't take responsibility for it when it does".
Google even created the 'beta' mark trend in logos of companies and services.

I personally find it rediculous and unfair to the customers. Of course products sometimes fail but we cannot abuse the term "BETA" for 5 (FIVE!!!) years.

Colnect has been marked as beta for less than 6 months since it went public before all key features were ready and prior to proper testing. Raising a site from grass-roots up is not a simple task. However, as of today, since Colnect is relatively stable and many of its key features (a lot more is to come but I'll elaborate on that another time) are ready and publicly available, the BETA mark will be removed.
Yes, my system may sometimes fail. Yes, it's not as perfect as I'd like it to be. However, it's public, it's working, it makes many people using it happy so it's not a beta anymore.

Buying and selling collectibles

A recent addition to premium members of Colnect are the buy and sell lists. You can read all about them here.

Buy List / Sell List

These lists are available with Premium Membership. Unlike Custom Personal Lists, collectibles added to these lists appear on the Collectors inventory information section of each single collectible item page.

When adding collectibles to these lists it is best to put the relevant price in the public note box. We suggest using world-popular currencies and use their 3 letter code rather than symbol. Example: USD is always US dollar, but the $ sign has different meaning in different countries.

NOTE! Prices you quote must be valid. You may add details regarding trades on your personal page under My Account. Complaints received regarding invalid prices (for example: you offered to sell an item for a certain price but later asked for a higher price) will be investigated. If you are found dishonest, your Colnect account may be deactivated without any refunds.

Japanese and Lithuanian languages added

Colnect is now available in 35 languages. The latest two additions are Japanese and Lithuanian.

Translations on Colnect are performed manually by volunteering translators who are members of the site. Whenever a phrase is not properly translated they can translate it easily. It's all explained here.

A recent addition is the use of automated suggestions. When a phrase has not yet been translated, it'll first be translated with an automated suggestion. An icon telling the translator he should translate (or confirm) that phrase still exists. The use of suggestions is intended for the period of time after a new content is published on Colnect (which is quite often) until a translator actually gets to translate it.

Yes, automated translations sometimes suck really bad. For example "FREE trial - 1 month" had a Hebrew suggestion that can be translated back to English as "Free trial - 1 year". What?!?! How did a month become a year? That is quite dangerous and I hope these mistakes are not too frequent. I hope that the automated suggestions many times "get over the net", meaning they are understood by the reader although acknowledged as improper language use.

Japanese is currently the only language for which Colnect yet has no translator and so we rely on the automatic suggestions. It's a sort of pilot to see if it can attract Japanese collectors and hopefully one of them will agree to become a translator. If this experiment succeeds, other languages may be added this way. A warning message will be displayed with languages that are not completely manually translated.

You're welcomed to check Transposh for translation solutions.

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.

Custom Personal Lists on Colnect

A new much-needed premium service had just been added to Colnect.

Custom Personal Lists

In addition to the common inventory lists on Colnect (Collection / Swap / Wish), premium members can create more lists. When custom lists are added, you can add and remove item to and from them in the same way you do for the common lists.

Common Uses

• Reserving items for a specific swap
• Offering many item for a single sale
• Marking items you wish to attend to later
• Creating a list to be shown to collectors on other sites

Gmail: back to the future

The following post has nothing to do with this blog but it's just something amusing I've recently seen while using my GMail. After sending a message, it tells me my message has been sent -1 minutes ago. Are they trying to say it will be sent in 1 minute? Is it yet another bug in Gmail?


Here's the attached picture. My interface is in Spanish so "minutos antes" means "minutes ago".

Biggest phone cards catalog for collectors - 142,000+ phone cards listed

For a long time, Colnect provides the world's most extensive collectible phone cards catalog. However, the phone card collectors on Colnect keep adding information to the catalog. It has just passed over 142,000 listed phonecards. The catalog is very organic and changes as the editors on Colnect receive feedbacks from collectors. It's freely available for browsing even without the need to register. Free registration to Colnect allows collectors to also manage their personal collection.

Coins catalog: over 14,000 coins

Quietly but surely, Colnect's coins catalog, being built by coin collectors for coin collectors, has surpassed 14,000 listed coins. It's freely available for browsing even without the need to register. Free registration to Colnect allows collectors to manage their personal collection.

Colnect's coins catalog is currently the world's biggest freely available resource for coin pictures and information.

Colnect rises on Compete / Quantcast / Alexa

I've been updating about Colnect's rank rising on Alexa and have now decided to include links to other rankings. So you can check out Colnect's rankings on Compete and Quantcast and start wondering what all these ratings are actually worth. So although it's nice to see Colnect gains momentum on all non-related meters, it's interesting to note the difference between what they report and between the reality. By "reality" I usually mean my reports from Google Analytics and, when really bored, the server's logs can be inspected. There's little connection between the real graphs and the estimated ones by these services. Colnect has been growing and growing throughout. Sometimes slower, lately faster. The graphs by Compete and Quantcast actually show a very inaccurate picture. Oh well...

Collectors premium services on Colnect

A few days ago, Colnect's premium services for collectors have finally opened up. Colnect has already been offering a respectable set of free services to collectors from around the world. These free services will continue to be offered for the benefit of the entire collectors community.

The announcement has been made:
"Premium membership gives you access to several features that will enhance your Colnect experience. If you regularly use Colnect, please consider supporting us by becoming a premium member."

Currently, not many premium services are offered but these will be added with time according to collector demands.

Happy collecting :)

Colnect's Alexa Rating Keeps Climbing

Since the last post about Colnect's ranking on Alexa, it has risen again, now standing at 144,039 whereas a month ago it was 184,627, ~4 months ago it was at ~360,000 and ~6 months ago ~500,000. More information on my previous post about the subject.
The ranking is coherent with Colnect's internal report, showing a significant increase in traffic during the last months.

Email Anti-Spam Tip

This tip will not completely prevent spam but will enable you to quickly deduce if you've got spam, how you the spam and help you decide what to do with it. It's quite simple, have your own email domain and give different email addresses at different places.

An Example

Today I've received this unsolicited (SPAM) email trying to frighten me into buying colnect.tw, colnect.cn and so on. Here it is:

From: kevin.wu

(If you are NOT CEO,please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent.Thanks.)

Dear CEO,

We are the department of registration service in China. we have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application on March 3, 2009, One Japan company called "Path soft investment Corp" are applying to register (colnect) as internet brand name and domain names as below (colnect.net.cn colnect.org.cn colnect.mobi colnect.asia colnect.hk colnect.cc colnect.tw etc.).

After our initial checking, we found the internet brand name and these domain names being applied are as same as your company’s, so we need to get the confirmation from your company. If the aforesaid company is your business partner or your subsidiary company, please DO NOT reply us, we will approve the application automatically. If you have no any relationship with this company, please contact us within 15 workdays. If out of the deadline, we will approve the application submitted by "Path soft Corp" unconditionally.

We would like to get the affirmation of your company,please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,

Kevin Wu
Senior Director
TEL: +86 21 69929440
Fax: +86 21 69929447
Website:www.qpnic.org.cn
Shanghai QPNIC Web Property Solutions Limited

Now, this email was sent to management@ and webmaster@ (both of them at my domain colnect.com). However, since I never give these email addresses to anyone, it means that every email I get there is SPAM. Other common names such as info@ and contact@ and others are frequently used.
A short search on the Internet affirmed my suspicion of a scam, when I found this blog post and that one.

What About My Private Email?

Well, you can easily get yourself a free domain on any service that would freely forward your email (such as cjb.net). Then, whenever you register a website, make up an email site_x@mydomain.cjb.net and use it to register the site. You would always be able to receive such emails but when this address becomes 'dirty' (starts receiving much spam), you can filter out all emails coming to it. It's a better solution than one-time emails since sometimes you do actually want to allow the site to later contact you. It is also a completely legitimate email address.

Symfony: Error Logging Hack

Symfony is an excellent PHP framework used on Colnect. As any piece of software, however, it has its shortcomings. The good thing is that I can hack it to fit my needs when some things are not to my likings. A recent hack I've done (and should have done a long time ago) is about the error logs. Though the guidebook to Symfony describes logging at length I couldn't figure out how to easily add some useful information to any Exception thrown on my production machine.

The following hack can be has been customized for my needs but you can change it to your preferences. It'll change the output Symfony places in the PHP error log file.

What the Hack Does?

A boring Exception such as:

[04-Mar-2009 17:20:25] Action "coins/collect" does not exist.

Will become:

[04-Mar-2009 17:20:25] CODE[0] MESSAGE[Action "coins/collect" does not exist.]
FILE[.\config_core_compile.yml.php] Line[715]
REQUEST[/it/coins/sdlk] REFERER[]
AGENT[Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6] ADDR[127.0.0.1]

How To?

Find sfException class (should be /symfony/lib/exception/sfException.class.php) and add the following method:

public function getMessageFull() {
$exception = is_null($this->wrappedException) ? $this : $this->wrappedException;

try {
$sReq = isset($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) ? $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] : '';
$sRef = isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) ? $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] : '';
$sUserAgent = isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) ? $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] : '';
$sRemoteAddr = isset($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']) ? $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] : '';

$sErrMessage = "CODE[".$exception->getCode().'] MESSAGE['.$exception->getMessage()."]"
."\n\tFILE[".$exception->getFile()."] Line[".$exception->getLine()."]"
."\n\tREQUEST[$sReq] REFERER[$sRef]"
."\n\tAGENT[$sUserAgent] ADDR[$sRemoteAddr]\n"
;
}
catch (Exception $e)
{
$sErrMessage = $exception->getMessage();
}

return $sErrMessage;
}

Customize this method to your needs. Make sure it doesn't raise any exceptions itself.
Now you need 2 more small changes in both sfException.php and sfError404Exception. Change the line:

error_log($this->getMessage());

to:

error_log($this->getMessageFull());

More Enhancements?

It's your call. You can email yourself an alert, include more system-specific pieces of information or use the code as is. It's obviously not the cleanest solution possible but it works for me and hope it helps you.