Theme Week - How to Have a Successful Blog: The Life of an Incoming Card - from Envelope to Binder (or Box)

Back in the early part of my blogging career (over a decade ago now!), I did a series of posts called "How to Have a Successful Blog."  For this week, I thought it'd be fun to return to that idea and see what's changed over the past 10 years (in some cases) - and hopefully I'll have some more good ideas to add to the community at large this time around!

If there's one thing that I've learned over the years that's super important when blogging (especially when blogging and trading) it's this:  be organized!

Now, I make no promises that I can show you the most efficient way to be organized, but I can definitely share how I keep my collection in tip-top shape.  My goals for my personal organization are as follows:

1. Easy to find something.
2. Easy to store.
3. Easy to update.
4. Easy to search.

I guess you could summarize all of my goals into a single word:  easy.

Unfortunately, as you'll see, easy does not necessarily mean efficient...at least not in my eyes!  To better demonstrate how I do things, let's go through the steps that I do whenever a new Barry Larkin card comes to my house via a trade package (or purchase).

The five Barry Larkin cards shown above are all from recent group breaks hosted by Colbey over at Cardboard Collections.  This is a typical sort of Larkin mail day for me - it's possible that some of those Larkins are new for my collection and it's possible that some are duplicates (obviously at least one is a duplicate seeing as how I got two of the same card out of the group break)!

To get a full picture of how I do things, let's start at the beginning.  

First, a package with cards arrives as my house.  As much as I'd love to say that I immediately open said package and blog about it, that'd be a complete lie.  Instead, I (usually) open the package and then set it aside on my table (yes, the same table that I've been trying to clear off for years now - you can see the problem with the first step of my plan).

Next, at some point in time I'll decide to sit down and write a card post about a particular package (you'll notice that I have four envelopes sitting there on the black binder waiting for me as we speak).  At this point, I'll open up the package and write about the cards.  That's typically all that shows up on the blog but there's much, much more that happens behind the scenes.

Once the cards have been written about, I take all of the Larkins and I sort them into the appropriate years.  One of my main projects this summer has been to completely organize my Barry Larkin Collection.  I'm not (yet) done with that process so for now I have some intermediate organizations steps depending on the year of the particular Barry Larkin cards!

If the Larkins are from 2001-now, they go onto the appropriate team-year pile sitting on my desk.  I have not yet gone through all of my 2001-now Larkin cards (part of that process involves TCDB, more on that in a moment).  Using the five Barry Larkin cards from the top of the post, two of them were from years post 2001 which means they get stacked up (and forgotten about, for now at least)!

If the Larkin cards are from 1995 - 2000, then I've already done my first round of Larkin Collection reorganization which means I have binder pages ready to go with empty spots for any missing Larkin cards in my collection.  Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), I've acquired many more Larkins from that time period since I did the reorganization and I haven't been keeping up with this time period...so for now cards arriving from that particular period of years go into a large stack (divided up by year).

I've been working my way through that large stack lately - my goal is to get caught back up through the year 2000 before I do anything with the more modern years.  The final three Larkin cards from the top of this post all fell into this time period and so they got slotted into this stack.  

Finally, if the Larkin cards are from "fully organized years" (which right now would be 1986 - 1994), then the real organizational fun begins!

Step 1:  Go to the appropriate binder and see if I need the card.

Step 2A:  If I do need the card, then it's back to the scanner to make a scan of the front and the back of the card.  Those two images get saved side-by-side into a single image.  

That image gets labeled and then saved in my folder of Barry Larkin cards that I need to write about for my ongoing series of Barry Larkin Collection posts.  

From there, I then update my master Excel spreadsheet which is what I use to keep track of every unique Barry Larkin card that I own.  Once that's done, I go to my TCDB collection and I update that as well.  This step is important because most of my Barry Larkin trading is done via TCDB so I don't want to be trading for cards I already own if I can help it!

Finally, the new Larkin card gets slotted into the appropriate binder page...and my temporary paper holder is removed and thrown out!

Step 2B:  If I already own the Larkin card in question, then I first go to TCDB and update my trade bait page.  Then, the extra Larkin is slotted into the correct spot into my "duplicate Larkin" box.  

As you can (maybe) see, I've only managed to get up through 1994 completely organized but I do hope to get a few more years done prior to when I have to go back to work in August!

And with that, the Larkin card and collection is fully updated!  Each new Larkin card that I get will either add another new card to my collection or another card for trade bait - either way, TCDB gets updated!  

Honestly, the system may seem convoluted but it's not so bad.  The one part that does suck though is doing those little slips of paper for all of the missing Larkin cards.  That's the step that takes hours (at least for years in which 100+ Barry Larkin cards were issued).  I do think the effort is worth it though because ideally I'll never have to rearrange my binder pages again - all the Larkin cards should slot in order (both by year and then alphabetically by set).

And the best part - once all is said and done with my reorganization, I should be able to quickly tell anyone that asks whether or not I have a certain Barry Larkin card - both in terms of whether or not I need it for myself but also whether or not I have a copy available for trade.  It's my dream that once my system is fully ready to go that I'll be even more active trading for Larkin cards (especially with fellow Barry Larkin collectors)!

And that, in a nutshell, is the life of an incoming Barry Larkin card:  from Envelope to Binder (or Box)!