Following the Doctrine for Colnect Philately

Colnect Philately is now under rapid development and is planned to have a limited release in September. Colnect is written completely from scratch, using bleeding edge tools which provide really cool features but come with a price. Once such tool is Doctrine.
Doctrine is a PHP ORM that is nicely integrated with Symfony. It allows defining your database schema easily with YAML files. The database and PHP classes can then be automatically generated to provide you will all the needed functionality of database interaction.
Doctrine is not yet a completely mature project and that becomes when using it for some time. However, it's going in the right direction and yesterday's announcement that "Doctrine gets its first employee" is an important step for an open source project.
So yes, using bleeding edge tools is a bet but being an entrepreneur is about believing, isn't it?

Collectible phone cards catalog has passed 100,000 items

Colnect has the world's most extensive collectible phone cards catalog. Just now the milestone of 100,000 listed collectible phone cards has been passed.
A big thanks goes to all contributors who are helping in making Colnect the best resource for phone card information. Colnect is a huge community endeavor that helps in creating a catalog with user assistance. This wiki-style catalog is changing constantly and thus offers collectors the most up-to-date information.

Yesterday another smaller milestone has been passed: over 2,000 collectors are now members of Colnect.

Colnect philately is now under construction and will hopefully revolutionize the philately world as much as it has done in the fusilately world.

Pages load faster when using CSS instead of IMG tag

This is a small technical tip to speeding the loading of your web pages. There are many tips you should consider but I haven't seen this one well documented out there on the web.

When using the HTML IMG tags with Internet Explorer (tested on IE7), the page is not displayed until the images have been downloaded. Loading images using CSS background-image ensures the page is displayed even before the image is loaded.

See Colnect's countries page which contains many flag images in it using this tip.

With FireFox the page is displayed but this modification will make CSS background images load later than normal IMG images.

How to do it?

Simply replace:

<img src="image.jpg" 
width="100" height="100" />

with

<div style="height: 100px; width: 100px;
      background: url(image.jpg) no-repeat center center;">
</div>

colnect's new clothes - slicker design

colnect's design had been too long neglected. It's not that I was unaware of the implications of a better looking website but I've delayed handling it since my skills as a graphic designer are not the ones I'm most proud of.
Since today, the site looks much better than before. Some CSS magic could do wonders on a website. There are still many enhancements to be done but they'll have to wait for the new version's launch.
An annoying issue that has to be dealt with over and over again is browser compatibility. It seems different browsers must interpret the standards differently. Personally, I suffice with testing every page on FireFox and IE. IMHO, FireFox is a much better browser and too many sites support only IE properly. The other browsers don't have such a big crowd yet and their crowd probably doesn't use them without resorting to either FireFox or IE occasionally.
Javascript can help with cool things (like these menus) but browser compatibility becomes an even harsher issue and it seems Javascript is a language that must always be tested per browser to ensure that whatever it is that you wrote actually works.

colnect.com - the new logo

Say hello to the new logo of colnect.com. The magnifying glass is commonly used by collectors when they inspect the quality and finer details of their collectibles.

The website still carries the old Islands Phonecards Database logo but this will soon become history. [UPDATE: it is gone]

And this last logo was a candidate but never made it to the finals :)

My visit to WSC ISRAEL 2008

My interest in visiting the world stamp championship exhibition might have been a bit different than that of most visitors. As stamps are the next collectible to be added to colnect, I wanted to get better feeling of the hobby and meet some people with whom some future business cooperation would be achieved.

My experience was enriching as stamps, unlike phone cards, have existed for ~170 years and so have more stories and are more established as collectibles. It's a complete world to discover.

Meeting representatives of a few postal authorities went very well. I tried to interest them about the benefits colnect could bring them. Most of the people I spoke with were excited about the ideas presented and so I hope that the enthusiasm would continue to real actions.

The attached pictures show boards containing some of the world's rarest stamps presented in the exhibition.

The other PR (Public Relations)

Just appropriate that following a post about PageRank, there'll be something with a more positive note.

TheMarker, a popular Israeli newspaper concerning economics, have published an article (in Hebrew) about phone cards collectors and colnect.

The Islands Phonecards Database story now has a Russian version (originally posted in English).

colnect.com has also been mentioned in Telecartofilistas and Dia de Folga, Brazilian blogs in Portuguese.