Two eagles and an Owl (and an update to my website)

[Kaleun96]

It just so happens the last couple of coins to arrive all featured birds on the reverse. It wasn't planned but I'm not complaining! I'm particularly pleased to have finally picked up a Starr V.B Athens tetradrachm as I had been searching for one for awhile and they don't come up as often in good condition as I first thought. It also doesn't help that auction houses still often get them wrong and label later 454-449 BC types as having been minted in the 460s BC, or even flat out calling them Starr V types!

You can find more info about each coin on my website by clicking on the coin from the gallery. This is also a good time to mention that I've recently overhauled the galleries under the "Coin Cabinet" section so they auto-update when I upload new coins and also to make more space for the caption/description in the lightbox when you click on a coin. Let me know if you run into any issues or have any feedback!

[kirispupis]

Nice coins! However, it looks like you have some bugs on the site:

• When I click your link above, or I select "Greek Coins" from the coin cabinet, I don't see anything
• On the home page, I can click to scroll the top "band" left or right, but if I click on any of the coins, nothing happens
• If I click on any of the "new additions to the coin cabinet", I just see an image but no details about the coin

FWIW, I'm using Chrome on Windows.

[Steve]

Wow, Kaleun96 => congrats on the fantastic bird-additions!! (all of them are very cool)

Oh, and I found your site amazingly cool as well (a lot of effort I bet, but it looks great ... well played)

🙂

 

 

Edited June 30, 2022 by Steve

[Constantivs]

Wonderful coins...  I also absolutely loved the 360 degree coin "photos" on your website. Amazing!

 

https://artemis-collection.com/showcase/360photos/

 

[happy_collector]

Nice coins and cool website, @Kaleun96. I especially like your 360 Owl photos. Thanks for sharing! 🙂

Edited June 30, 2022 by happy_collector

[CPK]

That is so cool! Very well-done as always. Thank you for sharing!

[El Cazador]

2 hours ago, Kaleun96 said:

It just so happens the last couple of coins to arrive all featured birds on the reverse. It wasn't planned but I'm not complaining! I'm particularly pleased to have finally picked up a Starr V.B Athens tetradrachm as I had been searching for one for awhile and they don't come up as often in good condition as I first thought. It also doesn't help that auction houses still often get them wrong and label later 454-449 BC types as having been minted in the 460s BC, or even flat out calling them Starr V types!

You can find more info about each coin on my website by clicking on the coin from the gallery. This is also a good time to mention that I've recently overhauled the galleries under the "Coin Cabinet" section so they auto-update when I upload new coins and also to make more space for the caption/description in the lightbox when you click on a coin. Let me know if you run into any issues or have any feedback!

Interesting, so

it was you who snatched that Ptolemy from Vcoins, i was trying to bargain with the seller, but apparently you were happy with a full price! Great addition- Congratulations!

[robinjojo]

Nice coins!  The owl reverse is especially nice.

Those coins are nice additions to your "aviary".

[Prieure de Sion]

8 hours ago, Kaleun96 said:

You can find more info about each coin on my website by clicking on the coin from the gallery. This is also a good time to mention that I've recently overhauled the galleries under the "Coin Cabinet" section so they auto-update when I upload new coins and also to make more space for the caption/description in the lightbox when you click on a coin. Let me know if you run into any issues or have any feedback!

Ales first. Great homepage. I already know her, visited the homepage weeks ago and was thrilled.

Have you changed anything?

Because the homepage no longer works properly for me. When I click on your coin cabinet - Greeks or Romans - I get an empty page without any coins! It doesn't matter whether I click on Greek or Roman coins in the overview - or whether I select the categories in the menu above. I get to the page - but it is empty.

If I do this 10 times and repeat it over and over again - and wait - it may be that all of a sudden, after a delay, the listing of coins appears. But if I click 10 times, it only happens once - and always after a few seconds delay.

This was not the case 2-3 weeks ago.

I have a Mac - I have the problem with Safari as well as with Google Chrome.

 

[Kaleun96]

7 hours ago, kirispupis said:

Nice coins! However, it looks like you have some bugs on the site:

• When I click your link above, or I select "Greek Coins" from the coin cabinet, I don't see anything
• On the home page, I can click to scroll the top "band" left or right, but if I click on any of the coins, nothing happens
• If I click on any of the "new additions to the coin cabinet", I just see an image but no details about the coin

FWIW, I'm using Chrome on Windows.

Interesting, you wouldn't happen to be blocking javascript from running would you? I use Chrome on Windows as well and have tested it with a fair few browsers and devices and haven't run into that issue, very strange. My site did go a few hours after posting this thread though as I forgot to reconfigure a CDN setting but it seems that occurred well after you would've seen the website.

Can you let me know if either of these two pages work for you?

https://artemis-collection.com/data-statistics/sibyl/

https://artemis-collection.com/coin-map/

edit: think I've identified the issue, let me know if it's working for you now 🙂 

The other two things you mention on the home page aren't bugs though, that is expected behaviour, it's only the galleries under the "Coin Cabinet" section that I changed.

6 hours ago, El Cazador said:

Interesting, so

it was you who snatched that Ptolemy from Vcoins, i was trying to bargain with the seller, but apparently you were happy with a full price! Great addition- Congratulations!

Thanks! Yeah I figured the coin would sell quickly and over the years I've found that missing out a coin that sold while I was trying to negotiate with the seller sticks in the memory a lot longer than the extra 10-20% you might end up paying 😅

Edited June 30, 2022 by Kaleun96

[Kaleun96]

8 minutes ago, Prieure de Sion said:

Ales first. Great homepage. I already know her, visited the homepage weeks ago and was thrilled.

Have you changed anything?

Because the homepage no longer works properly for me. When I click on your coin cabinet - Greeks or Romans - I get an empty page without any coins! It doesn't matter whether I click on Greek or Roman coins in the overview - or whether I select the categories in the menu above. I get to the page - but it is empty.

If I do this 10 times and repeat it over and over again - and wait - it may be that all of a sudden, after a delay, the listing of coins appears. But if I click 10 times, it only happens once - and always after a few seconds delay.

This was not the case 2-3 weeks ago.

I have a Mac - I have the problem with Safari as well as with Google Chrome

 

Thanks for the kind words! And thanks for the info on the issue, I think I've identified what was causing it. Can you try load the pages again from your end? If that doesn't work, try a hard refresh. I've tried to wipe the entire cache of that page for everyone so hopefully just reloading will work but let me know if not 🙂 

[Prieure de Sion]

1 hour ago, Kaleun96 said:

Thanks for the kind words! And thanks for the info on the issue, I think I've identified what was causing it. Can you try load the pages again from your end? If that doesn't work, try a hard refresh. I've tried to wipe the entire cache of that page for everyone so hopefully just reloading will work but let me know if not 🙂 

Sorry, I have no good news.

I clear at Safari and Google Chrome all Coaches - really all caches from all the time.

1. Visit your Website, select greek coins and it works! I see all greek coins.

2. Select roman coins - and I see - all greek coins!

 

3. Ok. Clear again all Cache Data. Now select Roman Coins at first - see what happens. I see nothing. 

 

So... I can clear all caches - only the greek coins I will see. but only after the cleaning of the cache! After cleaning first I see only greek coins. greek coins when I select greek coins... but also greek coins when I select roman coins. And after the first select - there is no function more -then I see only empty pages. So it work only the 1st one (but only with greek coins) and after that - all is empty.

 

Sorry 😞

 

[Kaleun96]

3 hours ago, Prieure de Sion said:

Sorry, I have no good news.

I clear at Safari and Google Chrome all Coaches - really all caches from all the time.

1. Visit your Website, select greek coins and it works! I see all greek coins.

2. Select roman coins - and I see - all greek coins!

 

3. Ok. Clear again all Cache Data. Now select Roman Coins at first - see what happens. I see nothing. 

 

So... I can clear all caches - only the greek coins I will see. but only after the cleaning of the cache! After cleaning first I see only greek coins. greek coins when I select greek coins... but also greek coins when I select roman coins. And after the first select - there is no function more -then I see only empty pages. So it work only the 1st one (but only with greek coins) and after that - all is empty.

 

Sorry 😞

 

Thanks again that was really helpful! It took awhile to get to the bottom of it, it was very strange because it would work in one window of my Chrome browser but not in another window of the same Chrome browser - regardless of how many times I cleared the cache, logged in/out of WordPress, etc etc.

 

But I think it's working now and should be correctly displaying the right content on each page 🤞

[Prieure de Sion]

I laying at the sunshine outside 🙂 but I can say it works fine at my phone browser (Apple iOS Safari). I will test it later at the Mac desktop again. 
 

 

[kirispupis]

8 hours ago, Kaleun96 said:

edit: think I've identified the issue, let me know if it's working for you now 🙂 

The other two things you mention on the home page aren't bugs though, that is expected behaviour, it's only the galleries under the "Coin Cabinet" section that I changed.

This works for me now!

I like how one can get to the deep zoom from the coin page. 

[Kaleun96]

20 minutes ago, kirispupis said:

This works for me now!

I like how one can get to the deep zoom from the coin page. 

Ah that's great! Someone emailed me the other week asking for having deep zoom links accessible from the coin page and that finally motivated me to overhaul the galleries and fix some other stuff too.

Going back to your comment about the "new additions to the coin cabinet", I think I can replace that with one of these galleries too - with a little bit of fiddling. That "feature" comes from some third party plugin and is a bit of a pain to use anyway so it would be nice to do away with it.

[kirispupis]

FWIW, your site has definitely challenged me to improve my own. Since we're not competitors, but friends who should push each other, the following are what I have planned for my own site. Feel free to steal any of these for yourself. In terms of time-frame, it'll probably take me the next 1-2 years.

• I like the ease of use and novelty of your deep zoom. I'd like to see if I can improve on it. Some time ago I got involved in photomicrography. Ironically I purchased most of the equipment I needed, but ran out of budget towards the end. I do have a StackShot rail that is precise enough for the tiny movements. I also have Zerene stacker and a laptop I can connect. For lenses, I have my MP-E 65 (5x) and I have two microscope objectives commonly used in photomicrography (10x and 20x) along with the necessary adapters to attach them to a tube lens. Sadly, I sold the 200/2.8 I was using as a tube lens some time ago, but a replacement shouldn't be expensive. Where I ran out of budget was the stage. I did price out some ThorLabs equipment that would allow me to make precise movements in xyz + pitch/yaw, and I intend to reprice them in the near future. If I can then use a servo to manipulate the x+y dimensions, then with the Mitutoyo 20x I should be able to get impressive detail.
• I definitely love your 360 views of the coins, though I find myself antsy to just take control and spin the coin like I want. I'm also not a fan of the putty at the bottom. To be honest, though, I've yet to find a better approach. I did read a paper where they took two Faustina coins, then used a laser scanner to roughly map the surface, then applied images to gain finer details. Their result was interesting, but they separately modeled each half and I suspect they would have run into trouble with the much higher relief Greek tets. Overall, I feel that it should be possible to construct a model by taking various images of the coin laying down each way (which they did in the paper), then fuse the two halves. However, I'll need some help here. I do have several friends with pHDs in imaging, and one of my friends once showed me an incredible demo where he took tons of photos of a room, then could "fly" through any part of it. The zoom was ridiculous. You could see the dust on a mouse. He's a busy guy, but if I can get his attention he may be able to point me to the right place. One major trick will be automating it for 200 coins.
• I like your coin map, though for some reason it doesn't work for me today. It worked fine yesterday. I would like to make it more interactive by allowing one to click on the images. Also, I've been considering how to use the map to tell more of a story - such as showing the breakup of Alexander's empire over time or (eventually) the rise of Rome.
• Overall, I prefer my timeline to yours (BTW, I received a 524 page when I tried to view it), though I need to update mine. When I created my site, I tried to create a graphical timeline similar showing the lifetimes of key people. I used Excel and it was decent, but wasn't overly pretty, so I didn't include it. I may use your widget to augment the timeline.
• I want to spend more time looking for a graphical improvement to my family trees, which suck. 
• One large change is figuring out new ways to list my collection. We take very different approaches here. Mine is a bit cute, but it's grown messy as the collection has grown (and I'll be adding ~10 coins this weekend). I probably need to figure out a way to present different "views" of the collection.
• Finally, I intend to re-photograph every coin on the site as already mentioned. For now, I continue to use my current setup. I may delay for the photomicrography setup - since one problem is a subset of the other. In the meantime, I'll play with lighting.

[Prieure de Sion]

10 hours ago, Kaleun96 said:

Thanks for the kind words! And thanks for the info on the issue, I think I've identified what was causing it. Can you try load the pages again from your end? If that doesn't work, try a hard refresh. I've tried to wipe the entire cache of that page for everyone so hopefully just reloading will work but let me know if not 🙂 

Very "funny"...

macOS with Safari or Google Chrome = i see only the greek coins (after complete cache clean the same).

iOS with iPad and iPhone and Safari = no Problems

Windows 11 Notebook wit Google Chrome = no Problems

All from the same WLAN at home. I will check this tomorrow with another Mac PC at another place - from a firends bussiness office.

[Kaleun96]

37 minutes ago, kirispupis said:

FWIW, your site has definitely challenged me to improve my own. Since we're not competitors, but friends who should push each other, the following are what I have planned for my own site. Feel free to steal any of these for yourself. In terms of time-frame, it'll probably take me the next 1-2 years.

• I like the ease of use and novelty of your deep zoom. I'd like to see if I can improve on it. Some time ago I got involved in photomicrography. Ironically I purchased most of the equipment I needed, but ran out of budget towards the end. I do have a StackShot rail that is precise enough for the tiny movements. I also have Zerene stacker and a laptop I can connect. For lenses, I have my MP-E 65 (5x) and I have two microscope objectives commonly used in photomicrography (10x and 20x) along with the necessary adapters to attach them to a tube lens. Sadly, I sold the 200/2.8 I was using as a tube lens some time ago, but a replacement shouldn't be expensive. Where I ran out of budget was the stage. I did price out some ThorLabs equipment that would allow me to make precise movements in xyz + pitch/yaw, and I intend to reprice them in the near future. If I can then use a servo to manipulate the x+y dimensions, then with the Mitutoyo 20x I should be able to get impressive detail.
• I definitely love your 360 views of the coins, though I find myself antsy to just take control and spin the coin like I want. I'm also not a fan of the putty at the bottom. To be honest, though, I've yet to find a better approach. I did read a paper where they took two Faustina coins, then used a laser scanner to roughly map the surface, then applied images to gain finer details. Their result was interesting, but they separately modeled each half and I suspect they would have run into trouble with the much higher relief Greek tets. Overall, I feel that it should be possible to construct a model by taking various images of the coin laying down each way (which they did in the paper), then fuse the two halves. However, I'll need some help here. I do have several friends with pHDs in imaging, and one of my friends once showed me an incredible demo where he took tons of photos of a room, then could "fly" through any part of it. The zoom was ridiculous. You could see the dust on a mouse. He's a busy guy, but if I can get his attention he may be able to point me to the right place. One major trick will be automating it for 200 coins.
• I like your coin map, though for some reason it doesn't work for me today. It worked fine yesterday. I would like to make it more interactive by allowing one to click on the images. Also, I've been considering how to use the map to tell more of a story - such as showing the breakup of Alexander's empire over time or (eventually) the rise of Rome.
• Overall, I prefer my timeline to yours (BTW, I received a 524 page when I tried to view it), though I need to update mine. When I created my site, I tried to create a graphical timeline similar showing the lifetimes of key people. I used Excel and it was decent, but wasn't overly pretty, so I didn't include it. I may use your widget to augment the timeline.
• I want to spend more time looking for a graphical improvement to my family trees, which suck. 
• One large change is figuring out new ways to list my collection. We take very different approaches here. Mine is a bit cute, but it's grown messy as the collection has grown (and I'll be adding ~10 coins this weekend). I probably need to figure out a way to present different "views" of the collection.
• Finally, I intend to re-photograph every coin on the site as already mentioned. For now, I continue to use my current setup. I may delay for the photomicrography setup - since one problem is a subset of the other. In the meantime, I'll play with lighting.

Definitely! I'm always looking for inspiration from others, to begin with it was very much TIF's and AncientJoe's websites.

• StackShot, Zerene, and the MP-E 65 - it's like I'm on photomacrography.net! I'm under the same username there btw but fairly inactive poster at the moment. I use Zerene myself but essentially built my own StackShot as it was a good excuse to learn some new skills and improve others. Thorlabs is definitely expensive in general and particularly so for any of their gear that moves! I just use their fixtures, mounts, brackets, plates etc but for the linear rail I bought a used THK KR26 (2mm pitch), which you've probably heard about. Can definitely recommend it, though it's not exactly "cheap" either. The mounting brackets and adapters from MJKZZ.de probably cost about as much as the rail itself. I've been through the hassle of finding ways to adapt linear rails to something "useful", whether it's a Thorlabs optical board or some photography cheese plate and IMO it's not worth the hassle trying to get the perfect combination of 5 different adapters to adapt the linear rail hole pattern to what you need. Best to bite the bullet and pay a bit extra for something purpose-built, which MJKZZ provides.
• Yeah the 360 is a bit of a pain in the ass to do and you can only minimise the putty, not remove it completely, e.g. I went from a white putty to a black putty, and then 3D printed the top plate to recess the "hole" in which the putty sits so it doesn't take up so much of the coin edge etc. My next big project is actually around this area, it'll be adapting my version of the "StackShot" controller to control a 2nd stepper motor so I can rotate the coin as I do focus stacking. That's fairly straight-forward, as is adapting my existing code, the tricky part is the photos because I want to create 3D models of the coins. I've had some success from test runs but the difficult part, again, is supporting the coin while it rotates. As you say you can do the thing where you lay the coin down, take photos as it rotates, then flip it over, but I personally had less success in getting a good 3D model out of it, particularly around the edges, but I need to revisit it when I've built the proper setup. What I'm currently doing is essentially "clamping" the coin on two flat surfaces at opposing ends which are covered in a hard rubber and then rotating the bottom platform via stepper motor. The top part of the "clamp" is attached to a bearing so it can rotate freely with the coin. It turns out you don't need much clamping force at all to hold the coins in this position but you definitely want to be careful and have something to catch the coin if it falls. And once you have that working, the other massive problem is obtaining an even light from all sides while minimizing specular highlights. I bought some polarised filter sheet for this, not cheap either, and it works but you do lose a lot of light when you polarise both your light source and the camera lens.
• Map - huh that's weird, my site's really not working well for you today! Is it not loading at all? In terms of interactions with the photos, that should definitely be possible with the library I'm using under the hood (MapBox), it has a fairly good API and should let you have something be triggered when you click on the images. I had thought about some of what you're suggesting too, like mapping the general regions each mint belonged to and then showing how that region changed over time (in geography but also in rulers). For now though that's a bit too much work and my collection is to general to have it more focussed. Definitely all possible within the MapBox framework though IMO.
• Eek the timeline not working either? 😶 It seems to be working for me in Chrome and Edge on Windows and Android but as we saw earlier today, doesn't mean it's working everywhere! It uses a plugin to link data from a Google Sheet to WordPress and from WordPress to various web charting libraries (e.g. ChartJS, Google's Chart API) but the plugin has been quite a headache for errors like this since day one and my capabilities have grown quite a bit so I don't actually need to use it and can make my own one instead. It also doesn't keep up to date with the charting libraries so I'm having to write a lot of custom code for the charts on my site anyway. I personally prefer my own timeline as I just wanted a quick visual representation of the periods my coins cover and my collection is too general to go into as much detail as yours. But I was thinking the other day of ways to improve it, first up will be linking the coins to their images so you can actually see what coin represents each bar on the chart. I may also add some filtering to it so you can select certain regions and timeframes etc.
• Presenting the collection - this is one I struggle with too. The "Coin Cabinet" is good for browsing but it's a pain if you want to look for specific coins. I also want to use my own website when I need to look up some info about one of my coins and the gallery isn't a great way to do that. I ended up making my version of the PELLA database to fill that need and I use it a lot now for referencing my collection. Fingers crossed that it works for you! 😅 I also added somewhat of an "easter egg" to it where you can click on the title of each coin to be taken to a "summary" page that has the info, the map of the mint, and the Ultra Zoom. I use that sometimes when linking someone to one of my coins as well.

 

Wow that's already getting a bit long so i'll try to keep it short in terms of what I'm planning, some of which i've already discussed.

• 3D models as mentioned. Was planning to work on it this summer but will have to see. I always find it quite difficult to pick up a project again when it's been some time since I've worked on it. Lots of code and electronics to refamiliarize myself with.
• General improvements. My new gallery/lightbox feature borrows a bit from some of my other features (mainly the PELLA-like database one above) but each time I work on a new feature I improve something, e.g. better coding practices, null handling, performance, responsiveness of images and the page layout etc. So I have to go back through the Map, Database, and even Ultra Zoom feature to make some improvements there that I've included in the gallery feature.
• Speaking of Ultra Zoom, I plan to rewrite that one soon. Initially I used an existing plugin but then built a lot on top of it and the original plugin isn't being updated so uses old versions of OpenSeaDragon. So i'll probably get rid of his stuff and replace it with my own code that's compatible with the newer OSD versions.
• The 360 photo feature is also fairly simply implemented at the moment and needs to be refactored. When I first started with my site I depended a lot on plugins to help me do certain things, e.g. include some javascript to tweak something without having to dive into the plugin's code and make changes. Now I don't need to do that any more so want to remove as much of that as possible and clean things up.
• Backend tool to manage my coin database. At the moment I have an annoying flow of exporting from Google Sheets and importing data into PHPMyAdmin through the terrible interface. It's always a pain to do and means I often have data on my website slightly out-dated to what's in my Google Sheet. So the plan will be to make a backend interface where I can import and manage the data directly without having to SSH into PHPMyAdmin etc.

I'm sure there's more but that's all I can remember off the top of my head!

[kirispupis]

Those are some ambitious plans!

I've been hesitant to code at all for my site. The primary issues are:

• From experience, the challenges of getting everything to work on each browser and on mobile vs desktop
• The fact that my day job is in software, and when I come home after a stressful day the last thing I usually want to do is look at code. 🙂 

That being said, the WordPress template I've chosen is currently doing me no favors.

[Kaleun96]

3 hours ago, Prieure de Sion said:

Very "funny"...

macOS with Safari or Google Chrome = i see only the greek coins (after complete cache clean the same).

iOS with iPad and iPhone and Safari = no Problems

Windows 11 Notebook wit Google Chrome = no Problems

All from the same WLAN at home. I will check this tomorrow with another Mac PC at another place - from a firends bussiness office.

Thanks for all the testing 🙏I've noticed some of the problems are cache related so I suspect that is what is causing the discrepancies here. But like you, all the usual cache clearing methods don't always seem to work. I even have more options available on my end, such as forcing all users to clear their cache of my site and redownloading the content fresh but that hasn't always worked either. It's been very odd indeed but hopefully tomorrow things will be working better!