Over the past few months PCDB has been under a lot of big changes and in the past week PCDB officially shut down due to a pretty scary crash that would have wiped out all our data. I was hoping this post would come later when we were a little more updated but since everyone has been moved directly to Portfolio52, I figure now is a better time than any to launch.
History:
Previously the Playing Card Database was run and developed by Rhu through immense time and effort on his part volunteering. PCDB was a creation developed over a year and a half but was slow in growth because of this. We've all been fans of PCDB but there was absolutely no reasonable way on our parts to expect 1 person to do all future work for free. When I saw that Rhu was starting to look to other projects because of those burdens, I offered to buy the site to help bring out the potential that it could be. That potential was Portfolio52.
Throughout the past few months I've been designing the identity, new site interface, and testing feasible features for the new site for immediate improvements from the first. Rhu still has great passions for the project and is now helping bring these dreams to life with his amazing skills.
Sometimes we wish there wasn't change, but after the crash last week I'm glad there is. We lost everything of the original PCDB. All our collections would have been long gone if we weren't already creating Portfolio52. I personally like to think this lifeline was a thumbs up from the universe saying that this was the right path to go down.
Goals:
When I first discovered card collecting I would have given anything to have a site like Portfolio52. Managing my collections, trading with others, and learning about value was something that would have helped me save money to curate collections that I was proud of. The aim of Portfolio52 is to help foster the card collecting community and to make card collecting easy for anyone who is interested. The idea isn't to have companies with the biggest marketing budgets tell you what to buy. The art of card collecting is to emphasize supporting collections that are extensions of you the collector and is something that I've always aimed to do with Seasons. That is why it made so much sense to make this service a part of Seasons.
Identity:
The name came from the idea of growing our collections like a stock portfolio. The idea of growing the value in the art and our collections helped create the name. The logo for Portfolio52 simulates growth in a chart as well as the motion of adding that newest deck to our collection. The logo also secretly represents the number 52 in roman numerals.
Features:
Our current features include:
• Home page shows the most recent statistics and added decks.
• Profile pages: Here you can see your 3 core lists (Personal, Trade, Wish). These lists update hourly to show you at a quick glance how many decks you have in each list.
• Drag-and-Drop is available to help sort your decks within your personal collections. Just sort and save.
• Customize your personal page banner and profile
• DISCOVER: This segment features an easy browsing section. Hovering over the deck allows you to easily see the name of the deck along with 3 buttons where you can add the decks to any of your lists without even leaving the page.
• CONNECT: This area is currently a forum area to speak out on suggestions, feedback, or any other things you might want to talk about. In the future I'd like to have a stronger learning section here to help people understand how to use the site easier.
• COLLECT: This section is to help make the transition easier. It resembles PCDB the most in the way it is aggregated. However in the future I expect this to evolve into something else and its current function to be replaced by an efficient search engine which should be able to pull up any company, artist, etc.
• TRADE: This section is one of the more exciting sections we're hoping to bring up in the near future after we settle Portfolio52 into stability. This section would also require one of the largest hurdles to cross as well. In the future this section is to have "MATCH" and "FIND" buttons. "MATCH" would sort through your trade list with someone's wish list and vice versa and offer possible trades for you. You would be able to sort by country so that shipping would be easier. "FIND" would be if you were looking for something specific and anyone with that deck in their trade list would be notified of a possible trade. These are things which require very fluid algorithms which is why they're not available now, but is something we think people would enjoy for the future.
CONTENT and YOU:
After putting in a LOT of work I still recognize that the site is missing lots of things. We're still in beta. Ideally this site would utilize every feature under the sun like mobile, trade algorithms, etc, but development takes time and is expensive
Our goal is to take one step at a time so that together we'll help build something we all truly love. There will be bugs and there will be things that we missed which we do apologize for. But you know what? We LOVE feedback. Feedback is how this site is going to grow, get better, and build based on the things that are relevant to our community. If there is a feature that YOU want, a suggestion or fix that you'd like, please tell us!Sincerely,
-Alex
