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 Since then some of the information may be out-of-date depending on how far back you're reading.

April 2003

Never ask for directions again.

To go along with the flags, you might want to mouse on over to Austin and the University of Texas, where you can get anything you want, in the way of maps that is, at the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection.

There are relief and political maps, weather and historical maps, and city maps, road maps, ancient maps, maps about current events (e.g. Iraq, Challenger), and more and more maps, such as oil and gas field maps, thematic maps, pilot tactical maps, depending on what these people can find.

If your postal history website wants to show where the stamps met the road, you'll find it here, and if not here, they also have extensive links to other maps on the Web.

Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/index.html

And if you're wondering, they cover the whole world this way.

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eBay Monitor

The name of this app is a little quirky. It monitors eBay auction bidding by sniffing out, or scraping out, the relevant details and presenting them on one little desktop screen, so the author calls it Auction Scrape. But it does a marvelous job, nonetheless.

AScrape is a small desktop screen that lists selected auctions either by item number or by seller and then goes about updating the data according to the user's selected time frame. Click on the auction and the full eBay page will show in your browser.

If you have several items at auction, you can watch their progress on one screen without re-loading page after page. It's simple and handy to just let the program run and update changes throughout the day. I run mine to satisfy my curiosity about certain lots and the ones I'm bidding on.

One hint. After you select an auction, click "file" and "save as" to keep your list after you close the program.

Auction Scrape
http://www.ericmarschner.com/ascrape

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The Electric Eclectic

My strategy for finding things on the Web has always been to ask someone who has already found it, which solves all your problems if you happen to know the right person to ask. Well, a great source of great sources on the Web is this handmade personal website called "The Electric Eclectic."

The EE is a link directory run by Jim Eccleston that has just about all the best non-pop-culture links you might need, and probably hundreds you didn't know you needed until you clicked them.

Getting around is easy. Choose from the alphabetical or topical list and you're off. The listings aren't meant to be comprehensive or exhaustive, and it won't replace Google, but what you have is a collection of links to some fairly amazing websites.

For instance, under "G," you'll find Geek Travel Guide With Country Index; Genealogy.com; General/Reference Collection; Generation Terrorists, the ultimate quote store; Genomics; Genomics Lexicon; and the Gentleman's Page, a practical guide for the 19th century American man.

The Electric Eclectic
http://bloxword.ca/jimsbmks.htm

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Discussions

Yahoo calls it "groups" and MSN calls it "communities," but they're the same thing. Someone sets up a group on either website and gets a bulletin board, chat room, and file area for group members to exchange information about the group's topic.

It's a handy, and essentially free, system for stamp people to get on the Web, find like-minded philatelists, and exchange notes about a few of their favorite things, and there's a wide assortment of stamp groups already in full swing.

Yahoo's biggest philatelic group seems to be the ever-active "Birds on Stamps" group. Birds, themselves, are a popular topical or thematic, as they say in UK, so this may be partially a case of bird people having a serendipitous relationship with stamps.

Birds on Stamps
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/birds-on-stamps/