More than 2 years ago, Mrs. GeoK laboured for a few days to get her geocoin collection all set up on the GeoCoin Collecting Trading Gallery. But for about a year now, there have been rumours that the owners of the service were going to be shutting it down and starting up a new online service.
Sure enough, last time she tried to sign on, Mrs. GeoKs’ account had expired and the site currently lists only a dozen active collections. Despite her best efforts, Mrs. GeoK has been unable to find any information about a new service. She now sees the downside in online geocoin collection inventory services – that can cease to operate!!
As a result, Mrs. GeoK is now into day 3 of entering her geocoins into GeoLobo’s GeoCoins database application. This one resides on her computer. The bonus is that as other users set-up new geocoin "profiles", they’re downloadable into the database, which currently lists more than 8,000 geocoins.
Even so, it’s slow going…sorting through bins and bins of coins, setting them up, trying to go back and record where they came from; whether via purchase, trade or gift; if by way of purchase, what the purchase price was, etc. And many of the coins don’t have pictures attached, so in some cases the set-up effort requires scanning an image of both sides of the coin, using some sort of editing software to remove the tracking number, cropping the image so it will fit and then adding it to the geocoin profile.
As a result, after 3 days (total time about 15 hours), almost 300 trackable geocoins (names beginning with the letters A through D) are set-up in the database. It’s time to play around a bit with the reporting functionality and attend to some other responsibilities before getting back to the data entry / scanning / geocoin profile set-up effort.
Best guess at this point – given everything else going on this month – is that it will be late June before everything’s finished. This is also a good opportunity to check on the status of our activated geocoins "in circulation" (i.e. mostly lost or stolen) and to check caching bags, car consoles, etc. for activited but unreleased geocoins!
One other benefit of going through the collection – coin by coin by coin – is that it’s quite clear that our geocoin preferences have changed over the more than 3 years we’ve been accumulating them. As a result, over the course of this project some that we designated as "keepers" in the early days are being moved into the "traders" category.
Stay tuned for progress reports…
