baseballcardpedia blog

Site Update

2010-12-03T08:25:00.000-08:00

Over Thanksgiving break, I moved BCP from my server to a third-party hosting solution. This will help with the speed of the site, especially making saves as well as up time. On the other hand, there is a small monthly fee for hosting. The fee is based on the bandwidth and storage used. Currently, the cost is low and I'll pay for it. If the cost drastically increases, I may have to ask for help.

We now have 39 responses to our survey. The survey consisted of 10 questions; 8 closed-ended and 2 open-ended. Many of the responses were positive; users were happy with the site and encouraged us to keep up the hard work. If you are a contributor and would like to see the survey data, let me know.

If you haven't noticed, I recently added a new link to the navigation called 'Sets by Name'. This page will serve as the master list of all sets. When adding sets please add them using this page. I came up with a way to auto-populate the 'Sets by Year' pages, so we won't have to manage two separate pages. When adding sets just be sure to add the manufacturer and year to the bottom of the page. I added this code to the template for all new pages.

Maintenance

2010-11-16T21:09:00.000-08:00

The site was offline from 7-11:30PM Tuesday night while I was upgrading my Internet connection. I'm hoping the upgrade will make the site run a bit faster.

Two items of business this morning

2010-11-08T10:40:00.000-08:00

1) Based on our survey responses, I toyed with the idea of adding a 'Sets by Name' link in the sidebar. I then started listing as many sets that I could think of until I was too tired and went to sleep. This morning I read about categories and how they work. If we tag every set with both the year and set name, pages could be dynamically populated with a list of all the pages in that category. We then would still need to update both the year and set pages. In this scenario someone looking for a set would have to click 3 times; once on All Sets, then on the year (or set name depending on the page), then on the set.The other approach is to continue manually editing both the set name page and the year page. In this scenario, a visitor would only have to click twice, however we would have to manually update the list.

2) Tables in set checklists? What do we do for insert sets with more information than usual? For example, how do we list inserts with cards that have different serial numbers? Should we use a table or a list like below?

===2007 Donruss Elite Extra Edition School Colors===
Unless otherwise stated, 25 of each card was produced.

25     Bill Walton
26     Nick Schmidt /50
27     Burt Reynolds /10 EXCH

Any thoughts?

Multiple-series sets

2010-10-29T09:24:00.000-07:00

How should we handle sets with two or three series? Should there be one article for each series, or one article that contains every series? We should pick one way and stick to it. Any thoughts?

Traffic

2010-10-15T08:42:00.000-07:00

Traffic to the site has been pretty steady recently. Below is a graph which depicts the number of visitors since the site went live. Anyone want to venture a guess on what the 3 spikes in traffic were caused by?

Survey

2010-10-12T07:22:00.000-07:00

The number of visitors to the site is slowing starting to grow. To make sure we're meeting the needs of our visitors, I'm thinking about creating a survey. It would be a short survey, 10 questions or less, using a tool like SurveyMonkey. If you have any thoughts on other possible methods for collecting feedback, survey question ideas or anything else, please leave a comment.

Of off the top of my head, here are my proposed survey questions:

How many times a week do you visit BCP?

Do you believe the information on BCP is accurate?

Have you ever edited a page on BCP?

Do you find BCP helpful?

What do you like best about BCP?

If you could change a single thing about BCP what would it be?

Small server upgrade

2010-10-06T19:21:00.000-07:00

I successfully eked out 200 more MHz out of my ancient 300MHz processor by overclocking it by soldering two pins together to increase the multiplier from 3x to 5x. I also recompiled the kernel so the sever now has support for SATA drives! Not bad for a $25 server!

It's the yellow one in the photo.

On a related note, I have a few extra of these Cobalt servers if anyone has a use for them.

Slowness

2010-10-05T21:44:00.000-07:00

Baseballcardpedia may be slow or unresponsive for the next few hours as I'm compiling a new kernel to support better hardware.

Outages

2010-10-05T21:37:00.000-07:00

Baseballcardpedia may occasionally go down for a few minutes here and there tonight and tomorrow morning. I'm installing an upgrade which should speed up the wiki (especially saving pages). My 300MHz processor just can't keep up anymore.

Power Outage

2010-07-24T18:35:00.000-07:00

Due to a storm this evening, I lost power for 20 minutes, however BaseballCardPedia.com didn't go down. Hurray for battery backups!

Featured article

2010-07-07T11:28:00.001-07:00

We need a new featured article. Any ideas?

Email address

2010-06-14T07:02:00.000-07:00

I've created an email address for BaseballCardPedia. It's basebaseballcardpedia@gmail.com. I've added it to the site as a way to contact us. If you would like to be forwarded emails sent to basebaseballcardpedia@gmail.com, please send me your email address. If you have any thoughts about how visitors can contact us, please leave a comment below.

Business Cards

2010-06-09T09:31:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking about making BaseballCardPedia business cards for us to give to friends and other collectors. These would be especially handy at the National show. It might help us recruit more contributors. Any thoughts?

Partnership?

2010-05-05T09:07:00.000-07:00

I had a recent conversation with an employee of an online distributor/seller of baseball cards. We discussed the idea of creating a partnership. This distributor is a major seller of new product and they are willing help baseballcardpedia in exchange for our help.

The deal
When new product is available for sale at the seller's site, they will link to our corresponding page. They are also willing to offer discounts to baseballcardpedia members. I'm not sure yet on the specifics of the discount, however, I'd like to develop a system that rewards people who contribute the most. I think we may be able to work this out. In exchange for this, we must place a link to the company's site on our site and agree that this company is the exclusive seller/supplier for baseballcardpedia.

Pros
- increase traffic to baseballcardpedia
- more exposure
- possibly more contributors which could result in more content
- discounts on new wax

What do you think? Another idea is to have people/companies sponsor articles, i.e. Baseball Reference. Any thoughts?

Google text ads

2010-04-30T19:28:00.000-07:00

I decided to place text ads on the left side of the site. This way the site can generate a few dollars to help offset the cost of new wax for contributors. Hopefully the ads wont be too distracting.

Front Page

2010-04-26T11:09:00.000-07:00

We had a request recently to add release dates to upcoming sets so I tweaked the front page today. We really could use a new featured article. Any ideas?

Battery backup

2010-04-23T15:29:00.000-07:00

The site is now on battery backup. This will help during power outages. According to my rough calculations, it should be able to last one hour on battery.

April 13

2010-04-13T07:19:00.000-07:00

I lost power today, so the site will be down until the power comes back up. I'm shopping for a battery backup as we speak.

URLs

2010-04-05T10:12:00.000-07:00

There was a slight change to the wiki over the weekend. URLs to articles are now:

http://www.baseballcardpedia.com/index.php/Title_of_Article

And we're back

2010-04-02T13:05:00.000-07:00

I made a mistake Friday afternoon with the wiki that cost me a day. Long story short, I had to restore from a Wednesday backup, so if you made any change the last few days, please make them again. Sorry. Images on the front page aren't working. I'll fix them tomorrow.

March 30th updates

2010-03-31T11:08:00.000-07:00

Topps Pro Debut was released today so I added it to the front page. I also fixed the Twitter feed and tweaked the front page layout.

March 29th outage

2010-03-29T12:04:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the outage today. I upgraded Mediawiki to version 1.12.0-2 and it wiped out my configuration. Now I know never to do an upgrade without backing up first! The automatic Twitter feed now doesn't work. Grrrr....

Featured article

2010-03-15T07:41:00.000-07:00

I think we're due for a different featured article. Any thoughts? I also noticed today that we are the second result in Google when searching for 2010 Topps checklist!

Analytics

2010-03-04T06:07:00.000-08:00

baseballcardpedia.com is averaging roughly 200 visitors and 800 pageviews a day! The wiki is also the second result in Google when searching for 2010 Upper Deck checklist while Upper Deck's own web site is fourth! A big thanks goes out to all of the wiki contributors. If you are a wiki user and would like access to the analytic data, let me know.

Blog Authors

2010-03-04T05:48:00.000-08:00

If you are a baseballcardpedia.com contributor and you'd like to be an author on this blog, send your email address to sruchris@gmail.com. Unfortunately, there's no way automatically add wiki users to the blog.

BaseballCardPedia + Twitter

2010-03-03T12:53:00.000-08:00

I added the ability to send tweets for every update to the wiki today. It may end up being overwhelming someday, but I thought it would be a nice feature for now. If you have any thoughts on this, please leave a comment.