bobh

Very well said, Josh! I, too, would like to express my gratitude to R.W. Julian -- not just a master numismatist, but a kind and generous person who gives so much of his time in educating all of us who are less knowledgeable about the subject. THANK YOU!

I would stick with MySQLi. PDO has some problems of its own about SQL injection because it emulates prepared statements -- might want to look at this link first: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5741187/sql-injection-that-gets-around-mysql-real-escape-string Now back to coins!

I think it is only some of his silver roubles which are being auctioned here. He must have (had?) an immense collection of other Russian coins because he has been specializing in that field for such a long time. Here is a quote from the catalog: "(...) Mr. Julian has also been an assiduous collector of Russian coinage for over 40 years and we have been selling significant segments of his collection through our auctions since 2007 under the name 'Girard Collection.'" Further along, the catalog states that Mr. Julian's type collection will be offered by WWCC in November, containing "many of the rare type and date rubles not present in the current offering." So it appears that "Girard" was indeed RW Julian.

:crazy: I definitely see the 5 and the 7, but not so sure about 6. Great micro-photography, Sigi!

Yes, I know how you feel ... same with me! According to the preface in the WWCC catalog, many other coins of his have already been auctioned in recent years as part of the "Girard Collection" (???). Would be nice to win just one coin from this auction which used to belong to him!

Sold for about $3,800 incl. juice!

Now it's $3,250, and the live session has yet to take place!

Current bid now at $2,400 with 17 hours left to go!

Slabs do protect against physical damage, but not against humidity. Airtight capsules also protect against that as well as against physical damage. The only real advantage to having the coin in a slab is when you want to sell it.

I think you can use Dreamweaver to build the site and add PHP code directly in Dreamweaver. Doing a quick Google for the words "dreamweaver" and "php" brings up lots of hits.

I find this site to have a wealth of information as well as great tutorials, and it's very easy to navigate: http://www.w3schools.com/ You'll need to use some kind of server-side scripting language such as PHP or ASP -- there are probably other languages, but these are usually already installed in most hosting environments (ASP on Windows servers, and usually the database there is SQL Server and not necessarily MySQL, although PHP and MySQL also both run on Windows). If you have a Unix/Linux based host, MySQL and PHP are usually the way to go. Basically, it works like this: the client's browser requests a web page which typically has an ending of .php, although not necessarily so. The server interprets the PHP code, connects to the database, runs the queries, and fetches the data which is returned to the client as HTML text. Many times you will use (X)HTML forms to gather user input which can be used to query or update the data. There are lots of tutorials out there. If you keep it simple, it can be very easy. For implementing the GUI design, you'll most likely use CSS ("cascading style sheets") and probably some JavaScript. You can get away without these for a basic "plain vanilla" design, but most users expect to see things styled with CSS these days. But if your website will be available to the public, be extremely careful about taking steps to prevent hacking, especially guarding against what is called "SQL injection". It might be easier to create a site with some of the many open source website-building frameworks out there (Joomla, Wordpress, Wix, etc.) unless you are doing something special and need to build everything from scratch. Good luck!

Thanks, altyn! I'm not planning on selling it anytime soon, but have wondered about getting it slabbed. Hard to say what my real motivation for that would be ... it is certainly nice to have without all that plastic around it!

I downloaded the databases, but wasn't able to open them - there is a tool on Linux which actually allows access to the tables, but none of the GUI. Without any doumentation as to what the structure is, what primary/foreign keys are in place, what certain code values mean, etc. etc., it was totally unusable for me, so I gave up pretty quickly. IMHO it is just too much of a challenge to expect ordinary users without any IT background at all to use the database "as is". More than likely, they either don't have MS-Access installed (and don't want to install it just in order to test the databases), or their version is somehow incompatible with the platform on which your application was developed. Don't be too hard on your potential users here. Just my 2 kopecks worth.

Funny thing about the high bid ... there are only two bidders at present, but 21 people tracking it. Even for such a gorgeous coin, I only expected it to go for something in the low $1,000's. After all, it's not a proof, and although quite scarce, there are much rarer years.

"Those were the days" -- which was originally a Russian song called "Dorogoy dlinnoyu" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO1UKbyPRHs

OK, I think you might like these pictures a little better. They are more similar to the Heritage photos as far as lighting goes -- of course, I'm sure that Heritage Auctions has better cameras and lighting (AND photographers!) at their disposal than I do: That being said (or shown), I still think that the following pictures are better -- they are much more in focus and have plenty of luster as well: Take a peek at the reverse -- you can actually SEE the initials "АГ" of the engraver (Apollon Grasgov) beneath the hoof of St. George's horse (at least you can see that on the high resolution pictures on my website).

Very nice, Steve! I like the design -- really easy on the eyes.

I downloaded the files and can confirm that they do contain what they say (coin pictures, i.e. not porn or malware.)

I'm just wondering about the legal implications of providing this kind of link (no copyright statements in the files, etc.)? Are we (the forum) getting ourselves into trouble here?

Download complete! Each file is a compressed archive in .RAR format which contains nothing but the images of each coin, obverse and reverse -- no descriptions, no price info. Unless you are really curious, I would wait for the real catalog to appear. Are you sure that the request came directly from Sincona and not someone who works there?

Thanks, Loyal Citizen! Maybe they are trying to save money on bandwidth? (I think so )

Of course, I am very interested to see the pictures, as probably everyone else is, too. I just went to the Sincona site a couple of hours ago, but didn't see any coins nor any link to that auction. I would expect Sincona to put the pictures on their own website, or on Sixbid. Then you or someone else could put up a link to that place here on the forum. I wonder why they do it this way? How many links are we talking about?

I think it's my pictures, but hard to say without seeing the Heritage coin in person how the mint luster compares. The pictures with blue background were taken in direct sunlight -- a technique which tends to emphasize detail and preserves color at the expense of luster. The other ones were two different attempts at axial lighting. The glass I used has given me problems before, but I think you can tell from the obverse, the way the bust appears, that the coin does have plenty of luster. I should try to take more pictures with multiple light sources. That would give it more cartwheels, which I think is what you are missing in my pictures.

Heritage auction coin: http://coins.ha.com/c/item.zx?saleNo=3024&lotNo=25421 What do you think ... do I have a chance at MS-65 with mine? http://hairgrove-goldberg.com/Gallery/Poltina1910 PS - current bid at Heritage is already $2,200 with 2 weeks left!

And if you DON'T drink them, you die never knowing how they would have tasted!