Saturday, July 18, 2009

Coding Is Tedious Work

I've been using some down time to finally fill in some of the missing years on my want list. In the past two days, I've knocked out 1950, 1951, 1963, 1975, 2003 and 2004.

Now that I've gotten confirmation that my site isn't going to evaporate into the ether when Geocities finally closes, I feel that I have a renewed purpose. The radical layout restructuring was the first part. The second is actually getting the lists done.

The worst thing about this is that the further I go back, the more time I need to actually do the research on each set to confirm a player is on the White Sox. The modern approach to cards has taught me that just because a player is on a team, doesn't necessarily mean that he will be on that same team in a card set. This is even true for vintage sets.

The more recent I go on the lists, the more research I have to do because of the mind numbing amount of sets there were a few years ago. I think Fleer put out 80 sets with five different parallels for each (and a super secret parallel to be revealed on December 21, 2012) in July 2003 alone!

One thing I insist on doing is coding the whole list by hand. All the HTML is written by yours truly. Sure, a lot of copy/paste goes on too, but that's time consuming too.

The one thing that I am truly grateful for, during this whole ordeal, is some nice quality time looking through my collection. I can actually see what I have, rather than browse at what I have. I'm still shocked at a few sets that I thought I had completed, I hadn't. Plus, a few sets that I thought I had a long way to go on, are done. That is the advantage of physically writing out a list.

The best thing about all this work? The piles of cards on my desk are almost non-existent! That is worth it, in the end. If only albums and pages were cheaper, there would be no cards on my desk. At least the cards waiting for entry into the albums are all in snap cases now.

I hope to get back to putting fresh content on the blog shortly. Not just updates of progress on other things.

3 comments:

Bay Rat North West said...

That is a lot of work and it looks nice.
I am going to start my Fleer breakdown by all teams this week. Gonna be fun!

--David said...

I feel your pain - my desk is riddled with stacks of cards to be compared to the database and boxes of cards already in the database but haven't made it to the card pages/binders yet. I am hoping to get all that done once I giveaway all the other cards in the RPOK giveaways. :-)

capewood said...

I just finished a spreadsheet of every Phillies card from the 1990s. I mostly made the list using Beckett.com. for many of the cards they have a picture, which really helps and usually they give the team affiliation as well (although this isn't always right). I also go by baseball-reference.com where you can find out when a player joined a team and if all else fails, make a guess based on what I know about when cards were issued. It was tedious but now I have a pretty comprehensive list. I've started working on a similar list for the 2000s but that will take much longer.

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