Astute observers might have noticed minor changes to the blog. While the look has been the same, I add a News menu item and a Recent News feature to the sidebar. These were added along with the soft launch of the Coin Collectors News.
Following a number of years writing the blog, I have been added to many mailing lists that send press releases and announcements from around the numismatic industry. Usually, I only publish these releases on the blog when I have something to add. When I do not, they end up being deleted. Since most have good information for the community, I decided to publish them.
Rather than add the press releases to the blog, I created a microsite called Coin Collectors News at news.coinsblog.ws. Although the microsite has the same look and feel of the blog (it’s now my brand), it is separate from the blog. Since it is separate, there is a different RSS feed for the site. If you use an RSS reader, you can find the feed here. For those who want to receive updates via email, you can sign up at here. Later on, if you decided you want to subscribe to the feeds, see the signup fields on the top and bottom right of any page.
When news items are published, an alert will be posted to the @coinsblog Twitter feed, the same account as the blog.
The items posted on Coin Collectors News will be press announcements only. No comments or commentary will be allowed, including by me.
Subscribers of the Numismatic World News Newsletter were the first to know about this service. It was announced to them about two weeks ago as a perk for subscribing. Last week, I added the links to the microsite to the blog and now I am ready to let everyone else on the new resource.
Behind the scenes, I am working on a numismatic bill tracker. Currently, I manually keep a list that I update monthly. After doing this a while I decided to put my technical background to good use and write programs to search for new bills, maintain their status, and produce a formatted report. With that work done, the next step is to create a microsite to share this with everyone. When it is ready for the soft launch, the subscribers to the Numismatic World Newsletter will be the first to know.