I've been reading a lot about Zistle from my blog buddies lately. I had honestly never heard of the site until I started blogging. I made an account a while back, but never added any cards. Right now my collection is perfectly cataloged in an excel file that's pretty easy to find what I need, and I am building a master checklist off of Beckett's checklist.
Simply put, I just didn't feel like imputting my 13,000+ Pirates cards yet again. Buuuuut...I'm a fickle, fickle man. I decided to give the site a try over the weekend, and I can see some benefits.
But can any of you Zistle experts give me a walkthrough? Is there a quick way to import large collections? I saw you can import, but only by set and subset. Not bad to knock out team set of 1993 Donruss, but a little more annoying for that obscure 2005 Donruss parallel that I only have one of. Any tips? I was thinking if I sort my Excel file by player, it might be a little faster to add to Zistle. But any way I cut it, it just seems very time consuming.
And is there any way to report/delete multiple entries of cards? The OCD in me is really irked seeing 1976 Hostess, 1976 Hostess Hand Cut, and 1976 Hostesss Hand Cut Panels on my want list when it's all the same damn set. But it doesn't look like there's any way for users to clean up or report duplicate entries.
Any other suggestions or comments on the ins and outs of Zistle-dom would be appreciated. If anybody is interested, you can find my Zistle profile here, though I still have thousands and thousands of cards to add.
You can edit/add cards in the database yourself, which I love. However, the downside is that too many people input things very sloppily and often times flat-out incorrectly. Particularly the 'team' tag. This makes it too hard to import a team bundle, as you'd need to check that you grabbed them all anyway. I'm doing my part by trying to get the team correct on all of my cards, but yes, the whole thing is very time consuming. Plus, I find spreadsheets so cold and uninviting, so I like having the catalog online with occasional photos and quick searching/sorting. The entire site is run by two people, only one of whom codes, so it's probably too overwhelming to worry about a perfect database for now. As for the time consumption: yeah, that's just life in our little world, ain't it?
ReplyDeleteOne of the major appeals is definitely having a visual reference, though I also have something like 80% of my collection scanned and uploaded onto my website. It's going to be a little more time consuming than I'd like, but I think it will be worth it in the long run.
DeleteYou can suggest edits and alterations, but like Red Cardboard said, there are only a couple of people working on the site and any significant change can take a while. I created a flag for a set that was a partial parallel, alerting the admins that only the first 200 cards in the base set were reproduced as Gold cards. A couple of months later I got an e-mail letting me know that the flag had been accepted and worked. When duplicate sets pop up in the database it sometimes is easiest just to find the one that seems to be getting the most traffic and use that one.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the input. I think my OCD was taking over with the multiple listings. It may not be perfect, but Zistle definitely seems like a good resource. Now I just need to upload another 12,000 cards!
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