Art Zhitnik

December 16, 2012

2 minutes

The Work Continues

I have not written any posts during the last few weeks, primarily because there has been no significant news. In a sense, "no news is good news" because this indicates that the project is stable and continues to evolve as it becomes better known among collectors. There have been a few additions, though: Andrey Maslov has posted some aluminum variations from Moscow. There is still much to do before the site is comprehensive.

I have noticed that the emphasis in recent weeks has moved from adding new variations like the ones Andrey has contributed to improving the quality of the existing content of the website. I am receiving many pictures of the caps from collectors, who share their information with us when they have caps in good condition. I very much appreciate that! Where we can, we are also improving the catalog's images by correcting colors, properly alighning the caps, and cropping the images -- it is a long process! Today we have thousands of images on the site. It is difficult to make them uniform, since they have been created using a great variety of cameras and scanners, but the improving quality of the catalog also shows that the site continues is growing and becoming more useful.

We are also moving toward the end of the process of translating the entire site into English: 80% of this work is done now. Even though there are not too many English-speaking visitors yet (judging from the statistics), a complete translation for the project to be as useful as we want it to be.

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Calendar models - we show crowncaps don't exist in the catalog

Calendar models - we show crowncaps don't exist in the catalog

Most of the caps in the catalog are from calendars. Thousands of such caps also require organization. Putting them in order is already a big deal, but what was missing was understanding whether the calendar was complete or whether there were gaps.

530 new help pictures added

530 new help pictures added

As I announced earlier I've completed to draw help pictures of variation's key features. While I did that I managed to fix some errors in catalog, in calendars. I rearranged Moscow variations with many small differences - the variations have been grouped and now base variations can be found less complicated way.

Pictures update

Pictures update

Because of my collection storage method change, I decided rescan all my Soviet caps.

For a month long I worked on resolving various issues with this resource. Many of the issues demanded attention, but I didn't find time and courage to get rid of. Anyways, I've made some new features, and here is a list of most interesting of them.

Web Site Renovation

During the last weeks I've been working on the project renovation, mostly concerned it's web appearance. Not everything can be seen from the outside, but anyway here is a change list.

Statistics showing what board members have added to our catalog

Statistics showing what board members have added to our catalog

It may be interesting to some users to see these statistics. I have aggregated the data from the last few months, running from May 2012 (the creation of the website) up to now.

Results of 2013

Results of 2013

At the end of the calendar, it's a good time to strike a balance. I'm very glad that interest in this project continues to rise. Though we also have an English version, according to statistics most of the visitors come from the former USSR, and we will support a dual language interface in future despite the fact that it takes some extra effort to do so.

Enhancing the quality of the catalog

Enhancing the quality of the catalog

The crowncaps.su team continues to work on the catalog's completeness and usefulness. The good news is that we continue to have more caps and fewer white spots! However, we shouldn't forget the quality of the material in the catalog. Very often, we receive pictures that do not look as good as what we want, and expect, in a quality catalog. Because even a poor picture is better than none at all, we post pictures of inferior quality anyway in the hope we can replace them in the future with better ones.

We have a new editor in our catalog!

A new entry has been added to the republic's list: "Generics".

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