The News from ElephantToenails.com

How do you have your collection inventoried?

You may say, “Inventoried, I don’t have so many I can’t keep up with what I have.” Well, let me tell you two things- First, it will get to the point you simply can’t keep up with all the details about each knife, when you bought it, from whom, the value and price you paid, etc. and second, you need a written record for your insurance and for your loved ones to use when they want to cash them out

There has been a knife inventory software around for several years. I resisted it. Thinking I would just use The List on ET.com as my inventory. Well, I have found a fantastic application/program that is very easily customized.

I spent about 20 minutes and came up with this as a template for mine. It will take several months for me to load it (because I must take new photos and then will need to reload most of them in The List to replace the dark ones up now).

Here it is. I know the categories may be hard to read but I made them and then can add a text field, a currency field, drop down menus, as many pics holders as I want and as many pages as I want. This one is two pages (left side and right side). I can customize the look of it by choosing different color backgrounds, etc.

What is really cool is there are two views of this information. If you notice in the top left are the words “Table and Form.” The view with the green background is the Form view.

The spreadsheet format is the Table view. You can see on the right side are the fields I select to customize the spreadsheet view. The numbers and currency columns will total at the bottom (like Excel or Numbers). I haven’t added mine yet and made this as a sample.

You enter in the info one time and then can see it in the Table View (spreadsheet format) and the Form View.

This is a Filemaker Product offering Database Software. This one I have is called Bento. It is a Mac product, but FileMaker offers products for Windows and Macs.  I wanted Bento when I first saw it in a Mac Magazine a month ago, BUT, it only runs on Mac’s newest OS system (Leopard 10.5) Yesterday I installed the new OS system. I was very anxious about installing the new OS system because you know the old saying- “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” well, mine wasn’t broke and I ran the risk of breaking it.

There were some real horror stories out there about the extreme problems encountered when installing Leopard. I am very happy to report it went off without a hitch so I am up and running full steam. I loaded Bento right away and started playing with it. Now the big task, converting over to it 100%.

I did a search for Knife Collection Software and there are other options, including a discussion at one of the knife forums talking about using Word and Excel. I have had mine in Excel for years but like the look of Bento much better and it serves the same function with the Table View, plus I get the Form View.

I promised you a while back to provide you with details on how to “subscribe” to The News feeds and here it is.

While I don’t want you to stop coming the ET.com or The News to just browse around, this really cool feature allows you to subscribe to know when I have posted a new article/post in The News without necessarily being forced to come to the site to check it.

The orange icon shown above is the symbol a site (The News articles in particular) uses to let you know if it is subscribible. I know we don’t like to read highly technical computer talk, but to you who are interested or a bit tech savvy this is the way to go. I subscribe to a bunch of different feeds and can at a glance tell if a new post is up at my favorite blogs.

What is an RSS feed? Click the orange icon  shown in the URL field and follow the directions by clicking “Subscribe to this feed”. When you want to see if I’ve posted anything new, click the star symbol (in Internet Explorer) and then click “Feeds.” My feed will be there and if I’ve posted anything new, it will be highlighted. If you hover your mouse over it, it will tell you how many are new. Click it and it will display them for you

I use Foxfire browser and it has an “add-on” news reader that does the trick, but readers are everywhere depending upon what you like and want to use.

To learn more check out RSS Feed and continue to learn about this wonderful tool.

I don’t know if you remember but here about a month ago you guys gave me the liberty to include an off the subject topic from time to time- well here you go.

How would you like to be able to search the web without having to type words into a search engine, instead you show it a picture of what you want it to find? Check this out! Talk about cool!! (more…)

Over the last 5 years it has been interesting to watch how folks use ET.com. Even though we are just one site among BILLIONS out there in cyberspace, I am glad folks visit and use the information in their pursuit and enjoyment of toenail collecting.

This post probably won’t interest most of you, but to you who have a little nerdiness, a little techieness, I thought I would give you an overview of the visits to the site.

For the month of March 2008-

• The entire site (all of ET.com) had 3594 visits (115 visitors a day), with 1860 unique visitors for the month.
• The average number of page views was 7.24- which is excellent.
• The average time spent on the site was 6.30 minutes
• Folks came to the site: 60% came direct, 26% from search engines and 17% were referred from other websites.

The most popular areas of ET.com were:

1. The News
2. The List
3. Recent Sales

The most popular areas of The News were

1. The News homepage,
2. Vintage Toenail Price Guide,
3. Collector Profiles
4. Toenail Q & A

Visitors to The News (my country tracker for ET.com isn’t working for some reason at this time) came from (and in this order):

1. US
2. UK
3. Canada
4. Poland
5. China
6. France
7. Germany
8. Australia
9. Bulgaria

Drilling the Geo search down deeper for the US: Top 10 States by number of visits to The News were:

1. Alabama- doesn’t count me (from 8 cities)
2. Ohi0 (from 14 cities)
3. Kentucky (from 9 cities)
4. New York (from 15 cities)
5. Maryland (from 6 cities)
6. Virginia (from 13 cities)
7. Penn (from 19 cities)
8. California (from 17 cities)
9. Georgia (from 11 cities)

Interesting tidbit: The folks from Maryland had the highest overall average time on the site with 10:34 minute average each time they visited. 

Now some highly techie stats:

• Of those who came from search engines: 61.5% were from Google, 17.7% from Yahoo, 8.3% from Google Image searches and the balance were MSN, AOL, Dogpile, Netscape and Earthlink, and in that order.
• Browers were: 73.3% used MS Internet Explorer, 14.4% Firefox, 4.6% Safari, followed by Mozilla, Opera, Netscape, K-Meleon, Firebird and Phoenix.
• Operating Systems: 84.1% used Windows, 11.5% Mac, the rest are Linus, FreeBSD, WebTV, Sun Solaris, RISC OS, BeOS.

First off allow me to come clean. In case you don’t know it- I am a computer nerd (and yes, I do read software manuals, dozens of books on all the applications/programs I use), but since, from time to time the question comes up what computer do I use- well, for all you techies out there. I’m a Mac Man.

I know from reading the ET.com stats about 73% of the visitors to the site are using a windows based system running IE. Foxfire and Safari are about 18%.

I started using a Mac back in the late 1980’s with my first computer was a Quadra 650AV. Then a couple of years later I got me a Powerbook 5300cs. Eventually I had to switch over to a windows based system in order to access our office network. At the end of 07, I purchased an iPhone and then converted totally back over to an Intel powered MacBook Pro 17′ that allows me to run both the Mac operating system and windows XP (I didn’t upgrade to Vista). This enables me to still access our network and play on my Mac.

I will say, using the Mac is much more fun….now I’ve done it. Be nice with your posts here. We are family remember

I use iPhoto, iMovie, Final Cut Express and iWeb to produce my family website and blog. I also host two websites with blogs created in rapidweaver to help folks learn about the benefits of selling real estate by auction. When I get home in the evenings I plug into my 30 inch HD Apple Display and play away.