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 :)
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 :)
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:To learn a bit about colnect.com and its history you're welcomed to read this post made by a collector.
colnect.com is participating in a competition called “startup 2.0“.
The reason to go on this competition is to get some exposure but I’m wondering how votes would actually be cast when 141 companies (as of now) participate. Will any person actually review ALL THESE COMPANIES? I doubt it. My assumption is that lobbying is the name of the game and perhaps social networking would provide a useful tool. “Come along and vote for me” campaigns or “get me some 10,000 people from a third world country to vote for me” are most likely to get the companies to the final stage where the judges will have their say.
So, since my limited budget cannot afford 10,000 third-world country votes, I pledge thee “come along and vote for me” :)
The main reason for starting this blog is promoting my project - colnect.com
The main reason for you to possibly read it would be that perhaps my insights as an entrepreneur of a cool web2.0 project currently under development would be of some service.
I’ll try to keep it interesting.
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