Secret Project Revealed

I've been teasing my big mystery project for some time now...I began working on it in August, and other than the two weeks I did not have my computer, and one week spent on the Sousafly collection, I've been working on it almost every waking hour since then. I wasn't going to reveal quite yet, but I had to get some help, so I revealed what it was  on the Database today, and I had to reveal it here as well.

Here's the basic gist of it- whenever I wanted to post something, I'd have to go hunting for it. When I wanted to do a grand overview post- like a Uniform History post, or an Encyclopedia post, I'd have to spend hours trying to find what I needed to post- the Uniform History posts took me 7 hours each to compose.

So, I decided I would create folders for each team and each person, and copy and paste my entire scan collection so I would be able to see anything at any time. If I wanted to see all my Elton Brand cards, for example, I would go to NBA by Player > B > Brand, Elton. That's three clicks to see it all. If I wanted to see how my New York Rangers collection is progressing, I would go to NHL by Team > New York Rangers.  I would still be able to go to the overall listing and see everything sorted by set, in numerical order, as my scan collection has been sorted since 2009 when I began the process of scanning everything.

My collection is pretty large- I've scanned more than 122,000 cards. (all topics combined). I started sorting with NHL, because my collection is still small enough that I can run new project ideas through it and see how it would really look, and I loved it. I knocked off football and baseball in a night each. But the NBA...that's where I got slowed down. Well over 50% of my entire collection is NBA. (91,000 out of 160,000 cards) I've been working on the NBA for quite a while now. I finished the teams but only got as far as letter R before my computer died. (I've since finished R and begun S).

But I still have to do all of T-Z and the majority of S. I have not even begun NASCAR and other racing, or the other sports or Non-Sports. The final two will not have teams to worry about. While there are teams in other sports, I don't really have enough of them to worry about. Other sports will be all the Olympic cards, and the random other sports that have entered my collection. A pack here or there doesn't add much, but years of SI For Kids multi-sport cards sure does. Everything not in the Big 5 sports will be mixed together, sorted into albums for each person.

NASCAR will be a lot of work for me, because my scan collection is in a bit of flux. I did NASCAR first, but due to a combination of being clueless and maybe a little bit of lack of technology- I didn't have PhotoScape for most of that time- the scans are not great. All of them need to be corrected, some of them need to be remade from scratch, because back then I was OK with "close enough". I'm not now.

I'm going to do what I can for NASCAR for now, and do the rest when I scan the backs- I still have mostly only the fronts done for NASCAR.

But wait, there's more. While I am doing this all on my Seagate remote hard drive...I'm also putting it online. I've launched a new website, which you can see here: New Cardboard History Website

I'm still  in the upload process. I have only gotten the basketball teams posted, so far. I still have so much more to do, but at least now it's far enough along that I can share the link.

I am running into a small problem...I am not sure I can afford the storage capacity to display everything as I want to. I have maintained my main Fotki account since 2004, and I have so much stuff on there that it costs me $96 a year. The card site should cost less than that, but it might be more than I can do. The basketball by team used up 51% of my storage capacity as I currently have it. I still want to post it two more times, (by person and by set) plus I have not even started to upload the hockey, racing, or anything else. While it shouldn't cost me $96, it will have to go up each year. Having to pay for medicine, and the car, and the computer- both of the latter two will be paying for until 2020 at least, and the medicine the rest of my life...I just don't know. I already know that I will probably not be able to take part in this year's COMC or Dave and Adams Black Friday sales. (having to buy a new computer ensured that)

Even if I can't upload it to the website, at least I will be able to see it on my own hard drive, and it will sure make things easier for me to create posts for this Cardboard History.

I do plan to keep up with the basketball teams I've already uploaded. On the 1st of each month I upload what I've done in the previous month to my main website, which already has my cards by set. After I finish that upload I will work on the new Cardboard History Fotki.

While I realize this is probably only a big deal to me, this is a project I've wanted to do a long time, and I'm happy to be able to do it. If the maintaining of the new site means it takes me longer to finish scanning my entire collection, I actually view that as a good thing.

I've already seen how the maintaining will work, as I had finished the NBA and NHL teams before November 1st, so I got to put the cards I scanned in October into place.

I really love being able to see the entire history of the team all in one place. This is exactly what I've always wanted to do, but didn't have the capability to do so before.