2012 State of the Site

Now with content!

If you were viewing this site a year ago, well, there wouldn’t have been much here.  More likely, the URL wouldn’t resolve and you wouldn’t have been viewing anything.  I guess it didn’t take much to improve over last year if last year didn’t exist.

With that said, the state of the site is, well, incomplete.  While the various colors and styles of Mets uniforms are more or less covered, things never progressed beyond that.  There’s still 29 other teams (30 if you count the Nationals and Expos separately) plus All-Star, Futures Game, and WBC teams, among others.  And then there’s all of the non-uniform material: jackets, hats, shoes, fielding gloves, batting gloves, catching equipment, etc.

And bats!  Those should be up early in the coming year along with the last of the 2012 product reviews and the thrilling conclusion to Upper Deck: A Love Story.  There’s plenty more content to look forward to, whenever I get around to wrapping some of it up.

In case you’ve lost track of what content has gone up in the last year or so, I put together a Site Index to keep everything organized.  You can get to it from the tabs at the top of each page.  Speaking of the tabs, they’ve been updated to match the 2013 uniforms, sort of.  Black is gone and the road grays and home/road blues have taken over.

As for the rest of the site design, well, not much has changed there.  The sidebar is still a mess and I don’t think the comment boxes are quite right, but the lack of comments has hidden that problem.  The sidebar on the other hand, well, that needs work.  There are also more than a few other sites and blogs that I want to link to, but it’s going to look like a big mess if I can’t figure out how to present everything.

Content in general hasn’t quite gone as planned.  Current products took priority over older products and for some reason game recaps became a big part of this site.  What’s up with that?  I think the game recaps are here to stay (even if they aren’t strictly on topic), but there should be more coverage of older baseball card products as I get more scanning done.  I’m not sure what else we’ll see in the coming year, but I’m bad at predicting this sort of thing anyway.  I guess it’ll be a surprise to all of us!

I never did post a decoder ring for my game-used material codes, did I?  I should probably make that a priority before it gets too confusing.  Rest assured though, the jumble of lettering does make some sort of logical sense.  That should become apparent as more styles of material are added.

You do know that there’s an archive of game-used material in here, right?  Check the Uniforms tab up at the top.  I haven’t exactly been advertising it, so I’m guessing that it gets overlooked a lot.

Elsewhere, there’s been some good progress in establishing a place in the fan community.  The Collect the Mets Twitter account passed 100 followers a while back, though I’m pretty sure most of them don’t visit the site, so I’m not sure what to make of that.  Twitter has given me an avenue to interact with influential people and companies though.  To date, several prominent blogs/bloggers, card companies, and other individuals have taken notice of what I’ve been doing through following on Twitter, retweeting, linking to posts, etc.  It’s nothing all that big, but it’s gotten me into the discussion, which is all I’m really after.  After a wait of about 10 months, I also received membership in the Baseball Bloggers Alliance.  It’s not exactly the BBWAA, but then again it’s not the BBWAA.

So that’s where things are at.  Stuff happened, stuff will happen.  Wow, this is a pretty sorry state of affairs.  Everything has to start somewhere though and we’ll just have to move forward from here.  Thanks for your support over the past year and check back in a week for all of the year-end wrap-up posts I can get out the door by New Year’s!

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