Created my own coin management software!

[kirispupis]

I've just never found anything that worked pre-made, so I wrote my own thing. 

Yes, you would be correct in saying the UI looks "less than professional" but it works for me and will eventually allow me to automatically update my web site with my coins. Although I haven't created the publishing part yet, the data entry is done as well as the album generator. I thought I'd show what I have so far. Note that this is for my own use. I have no plans to ever sell it, so I don't care that things are messy (some of the error messages literally say 'moron').

Here's the main screen where I organize everything. I have an import from an Excel spreadsheet where I used to track my coins.

I have three concepts:

• Coins. This should be obvious.
• Pages. These are topics I'd like to discuss and may reference multiple coins.
• Collections. These are groupings of pages

Here's the screen for a coin.

I can add tags that will eventually allow me to find all coins that have a horse, for example. 

Here's an example of a page.

Here things get a little more complicated. I can add three types of references.

• A coin, in which case the published page will include the attribution
• A page, in which case the text will have a hyperlink to the other page
• Just some image

The birth year and death year will eventually be used for an auto-generated timeline. The latitude and longitude are similarly for maps. Resources are essentially citations and links relevant to the page.

I can also automatically generate albums. I discussed this before, but back then it was a manual process to lay out the coins, then the pages themselves were auto-generated. Now I can do that much easier.

And this is what gets generated.

The next step is adding all the data. I have quite a few pages to author before I can work on the publishing part.

 

[CPK]

Looks great!

[DonnaML]

I like your little "fun facts," such as Crispus being executed by his father, or Claudius supposedly being murdered by Agrippina!

[panzerman]

You did a supberb job/ my hat off to you! I agree with Donna/ the historical clips are a great addition. I loved that trivia in Rasiel's ERIC-II edition/ plus that he revised a lot of facts/ Emperors. Congrats on a super job.

John

[kirispupis]

1 hour ago, DonnaML said:

I like your little "fun facts," such as Crispus being executed by his father, or Claudius supposedly being murdered by Agrippina!

Thanks! I originally had one coin per page and the entire story right there, but in all the times I showed the album not a single person read one. The fun facts have been received much better, though no one's yet had the fortitude to go through every album. 🙂 

55 minutes ago, panzerman said:

You did a supberb job/ my hat off to you! I agree with Donna/ the historical clips are a great addition. I loved that trivia in Rasiel's ERIC-II edition/ plus that he revised a lot of facts/ Emperors. Congrats on a super job.

Thanks! It was a lot of work to put this together, so it's great to hear kind words.

[Humilau]

Fascinating! I am not too coding inclined, but I've been attempting to learn how to create a database to aid in research for personal use. Although with not much success so far haha. SQL, htlm, css, etc are outside of my ballpark. One day I'll be able to figure out something. Great work on this and I hope it benefits your needs well.

 

[Nerosmyfavorite68]

Very nice!  That's a wonderful idea!

I'm pretty good about keeping up with current buys, but doing the older part of my collection is hobbled by my inability to photograph coins.  I feel there's no point in going through the massive job of cataloguing them if I can't photograph them at the same time.  Unless I can buy a ready-made lightbox or technology improves to make still photography foolproof, it'll probably never happen.  My other hobby just doesn't leave me a ton of time to do stuff.

It also doesn't help that my other hobby, old time radio, takes up a massive amount of time. Although I've retired from the most onerous parts of it, it takes a lot of time to restore fresh-from-transcription material. The shows don't clean themselves.  That's pretty much a seven-day-a-week chore.  When one has 70,000+ shows, you can do the math.  I've been slogging through an ongoing buy, and even the process of properly naming them takes forever.