Stamp Column Archives

The Glassine Surfer Column Archive

This column originally appeared in the American Philatelic Society's monthly magazine, "The American Philatelist." Since then some of the information may be out-of-date depending on how far back you're reading.

March 2000

Post Marks and Language

Guy Maggay's web site covers the development of post marks and cancellations of France in quite some detail.  It's very nicely illustrated and easy to use, but alas for me, it's in French, of which except for a vocabulary of 100 nouns, I cannot fathom.

I did spend a while pasting the page URLs into Bablefish to read the English translation, but the tedium got the better of me.  

Right now, our national languages still make communicating on the web difficult, so what we need is a browser plug-in that automatically translates all accessed pages into the desired preset language.

Imagine if all the world's sites were immediately readable in any language?

Maggay's site is a wonderful lesson worth your trip, and if your French is no better than mine, use Bablefish for those translations.

Post Marks and Cancellations
http://www.chez.com/memorial/inttp.html

Bablefish
http://babelfish.altavista.com

In a related field FAST Search now allows searching by language, while also allowing limiting searches to title or URL text.

FAST
http://www.alltheweb.com

Invisible Web

Spidering and crawling software maps the Web and constructs search engine indexes, but they are blind to online databases.  This is due to how db information is retrieved and sent to a browser, and when a search engine encounters a db it rushes past it as if it weren't there.

Today the biggest search engine only indexes about 16% of the Web, blind to the other 84% of the Web that is the "Invisible Web."

These databases range from a state's database of registered businesses to the millions of small user databases on personl Web pages.  

In an arena where automation is king, the Invisible Web still relies on people with prospecting experience to create links and web site guides by hand.

Gary Price at George Washington University runes "direct search" which is filled with hundreds of individual sources ranging from on-line books, library catalogs, Wall Street averages starting in 1896 and US states' business db's.

direct search
http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/direct.htm

The well-known search engine Lycos has a directory of Web-invisible Web databases arranged by topics.  You can search those db's once you surf over to their individual sites.

Lycos
http://dir.lycos.com/Reference/Searchable_Databases

The Big Hub used to be iSleuth and they call their database listing section "Specialty Search Categories."  Each db also has a search box with the listing so that you can search the off-site db from this one page.

http://www.thebighub.com/

Your Summer Vacation.

Summer will soon be here.  Soon it will be time to start making plans for your summer vacation, and I thought you might like to vacation somewhere where you could take in one of the large stamp exhibitions.

Even if you vacation with a large troop of children, you could work in the stamp show after the kids are tuckered out from the morning's amusement park expedition.

Here's the places, dates and URLs of some stamp shows you won't want to miss

San Francisco, California. April 28 - 30. Westpex 2000
http://www.westpex.com/

London, England. May 22-28. The Stamp Show.
http://www.stamp2000.co.uk/index.html#top

Vienna, Austria. May 30 - June 4. WIPA 2000
http://www.wipa.at/Englisch

Tysons Corners, Virginia. June 2 - 4. NAPEX 2000
http://www.wdn.com/napex/

Anaheim, California. July 7 - 16. World Stamp Expo 2000
http://www.stampsonline.com/stampexpo/welcome.htm

Indianapolis, Indiana. July 21 - 23. INDYPEX
http://hometown.aol.com/indypex/isc/index.html

Providence, Rhode Island. August 24 - 27. Stampshow 2000
http://www.stamps.org/aps/shows/stampsho/ss2000.htm

Auction Software

Everysoft makes free auction software called EveryAuction.  It's a CGI script so you need CGI access on your server and Perl 5.  If you or your friendly webmaster are comfortable customizing CGI then this may be a viable option for you.

Everysoft
http://www.everysoft.com/auction/

Thanks again for reading the "Glassine Surfer," and I hope you'll take the time to e-mail in your three to five favorite stamp sites.  

By sharing we can help each other and assist some sites in getting the recognition they deserve.  

Readers can contact me via e-mail or review the site links to previous "Glassine Surfer" columns online at my site listed below.