Vote for Writer of the Month – June 2011 + SECRET PROJECT REVEALED

What’s goin’ on everyone??

pokebeach.com
Is Stantler the unofficial Canadian Pokémon?

First of all, good luck to all my friends north of the border this weekend! I hope Canadian Nats goes well for everyone and I can’t wait to hear how it goes with the HS-on format… the results could have a big impact on US Nationals!

Secondly, we had 23 different contributors to the site last month! I thank everyone who submitted an article. I really appreciate it, and without you guys the site is nothing. I sincerely appreciate the effort everyone puts forth in every single article.

The article quality is just getting better and better too… I’m seriously blown away by some of the articles. I feel so fortunate that people like you contribute to the community and help grow consciousness of the game… it’s awesome!

And now it’s that time of the month again to vote for who was the best of the best from last month (June 2011). This month I’m opening things up so you can pick your 5 favorite writers (last month you could only pick 4).

There were so many good articles this month it’ll be hard enough to choose with 5 votes, but take your time and pick whomever you think is most deserving. Voting ends on Tuesday, July 5th at 11:59 PM EST.

As always, the top 10 vote getters will receive a FREE month subscription to SixPrizes Underground.

If YOU would like to become a contributor to the site (and have a chance to snag one of those free UG memberships), check out the instructions here.

THE POLL

Vote for your 5 favorite writers from last month (June 2011).

Poll closes Tuesday July 5th at 11:59 PM EST.

Please login or create your free account before you can vote.

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Make sure you click “Submit” after you check off your selections!

In other news…

SUPER SECRET PROJECT – REVEALED

Last month I posted about a secret project I was thinking of starting… and a month later it’s pretty much completed. Here’s where it starts:

I originally had the idea of having our own card scans on SixPrizes, so we wouldn’t have to always borrow from Pokébeach and Pokégym. (I really appreciate those two sites allowing us to use their images by the way.)

During my planning phase of the project I decided it would be a lot easier from a technical point of view to start a new website, and just have card scans on it. I’ve spent the past few weeks coding this new website during my free time, and I’m happy to say it’s pretty much completed!

It was pretty challenging trying to design the site since it’s a lot different than SixPrizes, but I think you’ll really like it. I have a few more things to get done on my “To Do” list, but I should be ready to launch the site sometime this weekend.

The only thing is that I am going to need help with people contributing scans to the site. I have been in contact with one collector who said he would help out, but I’ve sort of lost contact with him as of late. (Dan… where are you??)

If you’d be interested in helping out, please send me an e-mail at adam@sixprizes.com. I’ll be sure to reward you for your efforts… more info on the specifics of that once the site launches.

Oh and if you’re on the SixPrizes mailing list, you got a sneak peak screencap of the site… look for that in your inbox today.

Before I start rambling, thanks for reading and again, good luck to everyone at Canadian Nats this weekend and I’ll see everyone else at US Nationals next weekend!

-Adam

Reader Interactions

13 replies

      • Anonymous  → Adam

        Thanks for answering.

        But don’t you think that the site could possibly be a little better if you do it all by hand?

        • Adam Capriola  → Anonymous

          I honestly have no idea how I’d build it by hand, I don’t know how to code that well. WordPress makes doing it a lot easier for me since it’s already built in with a ton of functions has and a lot of support going for it. If I ever get stuck on something I can just Google for help and I always find my answer.

        • Anonymous  → Adam

          I’ve also had to design and create a couple sites for churches, a business venture, and stuff like that. The power of design toolboxes is astounding and have greatly improved in the last 5 years. Yes, you might be able to customize stuff a little bit more, but almost everything you could ever need can be found online. The ability to personally code things is a lot less important.

  1. Anonymous

    Ok, here’s my opinion on that “secret project” after I saw the images. Before I say anything, keep in mind that Pokebeach, Pokegym, Serebii, Bulbapedia, BebesSearch and even online stores like TrollandToad and Prof.Oak all have card scans. Hell, you can even search for the card in Google and you’re good to go. So, why use one of them over the rest? Because it offers something extra.

    Right now, judging from the one or two preview images I’ve seen, the only thing that site offers is the rating which is pretty much useless, if I decide to vote 1/10 on Emboar, nobody can stop me. The rating system is very subjective, cards are not like movies, they are either good or bad, opinions rarely differ between members of the community. Imho, the rating thing shouldn’t be there as it can be misleading and easily abused by people for whatever reason. As for the stats part, the one that shows views and comments, again I don’t think that’s needed. Seriously, I believe no one cares how many views the Base Set Farfetch’d has.

    Now, if they were removed, this would open enough space next to the card for more useful stuff. The most important being card text. No symbols, no anything, just plain text. There are times when you want to copypaste the text of a card and Pokebeach won’t let you do that, that’s pretty much the main reason I use other sources for scans as well.

    Another thing, next to the Amazon link, you can have buttons that search for the cards on eBay, TrollandToad and other similar sites, they can’t be bad to have.

    Lastly, the whole interface of the site isn’t gonna be as good as Pokebeach’s. Being able to view cards from the entire set without jumping to another page while the page loading time is at normal levels is great. So, what you can do is capitalize on what Pokebeach doesn’t offer, the search function. Make it so that, for example, typing “shaymin ul” gives you only the Shaymin from Unleashed, not every Shaymin card ever. Exploit it as much as you can, it should be faster than typing “shaymin (unleashed 8)” as you have to do in Bulbapedia.

    I really don’t want to sound like I’m just hating on your project. I’m just giving my opinions here. Sorry if I came off as a troll. ^^

    • Adam Capriola  → Anonymous

      Hey Barcanine,

      Thanks for the input, I really appreciate it. I am well aware of what the other websites offer, and I’m doing things to differentiate it from them. 

      The images of the site you’ve seen were just the single card view, I haven’t begun work on the set pages yet (that’s one of the last things I need to do).

      The rating system is meant more for fun than anything. I think ratings will average out over time anyway. My main goals with the site at the moment are to make it aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate, and fun!

      I think you’ll like it once it’s up and running and you can actually play around with it. And yes, I’ve kept in mind that people like searching with abbreviations. :)

      I’ll keep in mind that card text would be something you’d want to see in the future. Card text is something that would take somewhat significantly more time to input though. I mainly want to start getting images on the site, keep things simple so I can make sure everything works, then go from there.

      If you have any more suggestions, feel free to e-mail me: adam@sixprizes.com

      Thanks!

      • Professor Bain  → Adam

        What Barcanine says is true. Why making a website for card scans when there are many of them, even Google Images?I was wondering, what about if there’s something else? What about give a real use to those scans? Maybe a site where you can see the card and it includes information about competitive decks where you can find it, e.g. Emboar on Reshiboar and so on.In my experience, sometimes is annoying looking a deck list and (as happens sometimes in many SP articles), only the remarcable cards are shown. Sometimes I don’t remember, for example, what Junk Arm reads (because HS Triumphant haven’t been released in my country), and I have to look outside to find it.Furthermore, it can help people who don’t have or can’t have many cards (second point related to non-american players like me) to look for alternatives uses of this Emboar (following the example before).

      • Professor Bain  → Adam

        What Barcanine says is true. Why making a website for card scans when there are many of them, even Google Images?I was wondering, what about if there’s something else? What about give a real use to those scans? Maybe a site where you can see the card and it includes information about competitive decks where you can find it, e.g. Emboar on Reshiboar and so on.In my experience, sometimes is annoying looking a deck list and (as happens sometimes in many SP articles), only the remarcable cards are shown. Sometimes I don’t remember, for example, what Junk Arm reads (because HS Triumphant haven’t been released in my country), and I have to look outside to find it.Furthermore, it can help people who don’t have or can’t have many cards (second point related to non-american players like me) to look for alternatives uses of this Emboar (following the example before).

        • Adam Capriola  → Professor

          A site with information about competitive deck would be a totally different endeavor. That would be more like a wikipedia type of thing (if I understand you correctly).

          There are plenty of websites out there that keep images of certain things all in one place, and they do fine. Just look at gifbin.com and sportslogos.net – it’s convenient to have everything all together and well organized.

  2. Anonymous

    Adam, if there were a Pokemon Hall of Fame, I’d vote for ya. SixPrizes is awesome and the new site sounds awesome!

    Keep up the great work. We appreciate it!

  3. Mekkah

    Just wanted to thank everyone who voted me. I didn’t expect to end up at #1 after losing my lead within a few days. As you can see my avatar is pretty happy about it too!

  4. Anthony Smith

    I was planning on posting before, but, out there somewhere are 14 very kind souls who took the time to not only open and read the poll, but also decided I was one of the top 13 writers this month. A sincere thank you to everyone that voted for me, and to everyone that read my article.

    I enjoyed writing it, and would like very much to write a reflective blog again on my experiences with Pokemon, as well as delve into more practical topics (I’m writing a piece on fallacies within the Pokemon TCG).

    Hope to see you guys one day on a grander stage :)

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