Saturday, August 9, 2008

How many collectible phone cards are there?





Wednesday, July 30, 2008

PR4 or The Google Gods Smile at Colnect


So this is good news but some questions are left pending:
* What has now changed that Colnect deserves PageRank4?
and most importantly:

Donations and T-Shirt


Tuesday, July 22, 2008

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?

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Collectible phone cards catalog has passed 100,000 items




Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Pages load faster when using CSS instead of IMG tag





How to do it?

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


Monday, May 26, 2008

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.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008 - the new logo

Say hello to the new logo of 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.

Collectible phone cards on Islands Phonecards Database

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

Friday, May 16, 2008

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.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

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

Monday, May 12, 2008


Forgive me Google for I have sinned. I don't know the nature of my sin yet but I'll probably eventually figure out what has happened and how come my website, full of original content (it's the world's most extensive resource for collectible phone cards information), has a PageRank of 0, aka PR0.

Seems like the lovely WWW is made of a myriad of rules that dynamically change and are quite hard to obey, even if you're one of the good guys. Unlike the real world where you usually know what's good and what's bad, here you have to figure it out slowly, understanding that causality isn't as evident.

PR0 is considered a punishment but since Google work in mysterious ways (and keep their algorithms confidential), not even a prayer could work here. One has to search deep in his heart (and on the Internet) what it is that was wrongfully done.

So here's my guess
At the end of March, I've moved to a new hosting service and decided to also move to the new domain and so became

Since (the project which will soon accommodate many different types of collectibles) is still under development I've made redirects from,, and, as well as from the old

And so, it's possible that this is considered a domain Spam (when one has a few domain that link to each other to get better search engines ranking) although no bad intentions were involved nor any trickery.

But the site's still on top of the results
Strangely enough, although my website was seemingly punished, it's still on top on the results page when Googling for telecards.

There will be more posts on SEO, SERP, Google. Meanwhile you can check out these tools for measuring your website.

Monday, May 5, 2008

Google's AdSense for an international website






Refers to a French-language (fr) page while:

refers to a Spanish-language (es) page.







So now, if you try a Spanish link such as:

You'll automatically be redirected to:



Hopefully this post gave a sufficient outline to a working solution.

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Collectible phone cards database passed 90,000 listed cards today







Internationalizing the site is available in 25 languages:

Personally, I can communicate well in only 3 languages, fake some conversation in a few more and use some phrases to amuse an audience in a party. That still doesn't amount to 25 languages with their different scripts.

How was this done? The answer is simple: when your users love your project and enjoy its services, the nicer ones are keen to help when asked nicely.

The technology behind translations is quite straight-forward although different approaches exist. The important thing is to provide the translators with an easy interface they can understand. Handing out a text file full of expressions needing translations is a bad call for two reasons: it's boring for the translators and the translations may be out of context.

On the side of this post you can see the way translators (collectors) on - Islands Phonecards Database are helping out. As they use the site, small "translate" icons appear next to expressions that haven't been translated yet. Clicking one such icon pops out a window that allows submitting the translation. When translated, the "translate" icon is gone. It can later be restored to correct the translation - that's why you see so many of them in the picture attached.

There are most issues about creating a multi-lingual collectors website but I prefer to keep my posts short.

Saturday, May 3, 2008

The Islands Phonecards Database story

To learn a bit about and its history you're welcomed to read this post made by a collector.

Statrup 2.0 competition 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” :) now blogs

The main reason for starting this blog is promoting my project -


I’ll try to keep it interesting.

Link and Search
