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We've mumbled about this before, but it never hurts to remind ourselves that entering a postcard into this website is just the beginning of a complicated process of fixing small (and big) mistakes, structural improvements, cosmetic adjustments, and so on. Ah, if only it was as easy as just dropping in a new card. Here are some of the things we need to do.
Let's start with theme name changes. "Airplanes" became "Aviation," as we included airports or flight-related items. "Beer/Brewery" (why did we start with that, anyway?) became "Alcohol" when we realized we also had a stash of cards with wine, whiskey ... Even "Christmas and New Year" needed fine-tuning because otherwise it would not have been clear that we were including Lunar New Year postcards from around Asia. "UNESCO World Heritage" expanded from just "UNESCO" as we discovered the terms, where postcard issuers were concerned, are interchangeable.
You can glance at the list of 100+ Theme categories and make a good guess which ones we may change in the future.
Prices can go up, or down. We did an entry on pricing some time ago, but like many other businesses we sometimes respond to recent external activities, or sales, or lack of sales, to make some adjustments. Sometimes too, this is driven by the change in condition of a card. If it was originally Grade: 1, but we notice that time in storage has not been kind to the card, we'll change both grade and price accordingly. This can happen before or after a customer places an order.
Because of the individual nature of this website, in cases where we have many cards in one category, it sometimes happens that we enter a card and then have an identical one to enter two years later--this is common, and we don't always remember that one is already represented. When we catch these, we combine them, which of course means rewriting the descriptions and quantities. We don't really want duplicate entries unless there's a good reason.
Even individual cards' descriptions sometimes need to change, so we try to be careful about putting any card into a date or time context. Or, for example, the person on the card was alive when we entered the card--and our description made this clear--but then, oops, their status changes. This is not the most critical problem but even so, we need to do zero-base reviews sometimes.
Top priority over everything, though, is to get more cards into the site. We're almost finished with the latest round of scanning. Fingers crossed we won't make any mistakes.
By the way, this is Mau-Mau, our resident cat and co-owner of the site. (He doesn't know he is co-owner, which is just as well. If he did, the theme category for Cats would be twice the size, and there wouldn't be one for Dogs.)
Now to the point: postcards are alive. If you just see them as coloured pieces of paper, you wouldn't be reading this anyway. We've been keeping a list of ways to use postcards, and here's what we came up with so far. By all means please use the "Comments" section to give us more ideas ... we want to get to 50 if we can. Here goes, in completely random order (except for the last two):
* Frame them, one-by-one or in a group, and hang them on the wall
* Give them as gifts
* Teaching aids
* Turn them into paintings
* Kid's game where you take each other's cards by throwing them and landing
closest to the wall
* Display on the refrigerator
* Cover up the text (or just show the front) and make a game of guessing
the location
* Trade them like sports cards
* Vacation scrapbooks
* Adding decoration/information to wall maps
* Posters for your theme restaurant or pub
* As a substitute for photographs
* See if you can build houses with them, like we used to do with
playing cards
* Transfer image to a mug or a T-shirt
* On the bulletin board or at your desk at work
* Donate to local historical societies or schools
* Use as models for paintings (oil, watercolour)
* Save for the grandkids
* Miniature jigsaw puzzles
* Use as place guides for dinner
* Create a memory game with (for example) 36 cards upside down
on a table, and 18 related pairs
* Wrap or include them with gifts from that country
* Make a mobile
* Compare postcard view with a photograph of the same place
* Collect all possible postcards of one specific subject (Hint: watch
foliage change over time)
* Convert them to greeting cards
* Laminate them in groups, as placemats
* Make a mouse pad (yes, it can be done using the image)
* Send them to your friends and relatives
* Sell them
The other ideas we had were too far-out. Help!