Collectish Blog

New activity pages

We wanted to make it easier for you to discover what collectors have been up to. So, now each collector now has an Activity page which provides an overview of the things they have added to Collectish most recently along with comments & ratings that other collectors have left on their pages.

To make things easier, we have put a quick list of the most recent activities on every collectors profile page. From there you can click through to the activity page to view the entire history. If you haven’t visited collectish for a while, now is a good time to find out what people have been saying about your stuff!

Beta 1.8 Release

Couple of nice new features in this release include:

• paging between items/collectors on the Explore page – making it easier to browse to older content
• ability to edit tags directly on item pages (just click on the tags to edit them)

We have also begun to implement what we’re calling Community templates. Right now, the only “Community” templates that are available are ones that we have created for you. But in the near future, any collector will be able to publish templates that they have created for others to use.

Speaking of templates, in this release we have also added

• field reordering
• private fields (fields visible only to the owner of the item)
• multi-line text fields
• ability to add field hints (in case you forget what a field is for)

Have a look and let us know what you think.

Beta 1.2 Release

We have new release for you today with improvements including:

• carousel on each item page, giving you a quick way to navigate through all of a collectors items
• inline editing for titles and descriptions on collector, collection and item pages

plus a bunch of other things. Check it out!

Beta 1 release

We’re proud to announce that we are today releasing our first public beta of Collectish – now everyone else can join the fun!

Collectish Beta 1 includes a batch of bug fixes and minor improvements – plus a few major ones including:

• a feedback system for our users to submit ideas and bug notifications
• the ability to mark individual items as “private”, meaning that only the owner may view certain items

The feedback feature is really important. For now, we’re trying out uservoice as our feedback platform.  Users can now sign in and submit ideas using the feedback link which is visible at the top of each page. Obviously we also have lots of ideas of our own and this this system will enable us to test popularity for these as well.

We feel that the “private item” feature is pretty important too. Obviously we would like everyone to share all of their item records but there are good reasons why some users may hide some details from view. That said, hiding entire records is a bit of a sledgehammer approach and ideally, users would be able to hide certain fields within their item records – we’ll be introducing this feature (along with many other things)  in the very near future.

Alpha 3 release

We have held off with the Beta 1 public release while we sort out some internal process stuff, but development continues unabated. We have released Alpha 3 with a bunch of bug fixes plus notable new stuff including:

• tag suggestions
• rating on items
• report abuse links
• image lightbox (using FancyBox)

There’s some fantastic content being uploaded into the system!

World Collections

Testers will notice our first cut of the “world collections” section on each of the the Item pages. This shows stuff from public collections that might be related to whatever it is you happen to be looking at. Now that we have some real content in the system we are able to see how effectively (or not) it is working.

The fundamental problem with trying to create a mashup with Museum collections is that there are very few that have exposed their collection database via an API or an OpenSearch feed. However quite a few have built some sort of mechanism to browse their collections online which means that we can query them indirectly using the Google API.

So, the way we’re doing it at the moment is this: Collectish takes all the tags for the item and uses them to run a series of Google searches. The searches are restricted to run within a the sites for a few public collections that we have chosen. If a search doesn’t return any results, Collectish shaves off the last tag and then runs the search again, repeating the process until it returns something.

Now granted it ain’t the most sophisticated algorithm around. Two obvious problems are that the order of tags on an item affects the results of the search and the searches don’t take semantics into account. Soon we’ll be building in many more sophisticated ways of hooking into data from public collections – however this will do for the moment. And of course we’ll be expanding the list of collections we’re searching as well.

Alpha 2 release

Frank has just uploaded Collectish Alpha 2, which includes:

- support for Internet Explorer 6
- the first cut of the ‘Discover’ page you can browse content now)
- improvements to the template editing system

Still aiming for a Beta 1 release at the end of February.

Alpha 1 release

Okay people, the time has come to unleash the Collectish beast (or at least to take it for a quick walk around the block).

Today we’re releasing our first Alpha 1 version, which means that while it ain’t quite finished, it’s stable and usable enough for a small and controlled group of people to start testing. Okay so the user interface is still a little clunky, lots of things are missing and the workflows need further work – but there is enough there to get going.

The next release (Alpha 2, next week or so) will go before a slightly wider internal group, but at this stage we need to test some basic functionality – which is where you come in! (by the way if you’re wondering what’s with all the Alpha’s and Beta’s, Jeff Atwood has written a nice little description of the standard software release lifecycle).

For this release, we need you to tell us if something is clearly not working as it should. Whilst you will surely have lots of concerns and ideas around the design and user interface, remember this is a very early release and it’s likely that we’re probably already dealing with whatever it is that is troubling you. So please note any ideas down, but don’t hand them to us until we ask (which we will).

One more thing – Collectish is still not working in IE6. IE7 or Firefox for the moment please.

For now, take a look around, sign up, start adding your stuff and have fun… just let us know if it crashes okay?