Linn's Stamp News - Refresher Course Article Database

Every now and then when searching for something pertaining to stamps, I find some interesting Linn's Stamp News Refresher Course articles.

I only recently came across this link to a database of Refresher Course articles dating back to 1998. Many collectors will find these articles an interesting read or resource for future reference:

http://www.linns.com/howto/refresher/rc.aspx

Thank you, even though I am a long time subscriber to Linn's Stamps new I didn't realize all this valuable & helpful information in one data base. Thank you again and of course Linn's Stamp News.

Interesting. I guess I am not entirely off base by scanning and computing all of my stamp and postal history related articles. Some date back close to 50 years, but, are specialized enough to keep. I keep them for the reference value and re-cycle the paper.

Chimo

Bujutsu

good article
Tom

Great reference material - on so many subjects. Thanks for sharing wt1.

Wow how very interesting! I'm gonna pour over this today methinks. Thank you for the link!

Could someone check on this, and confirm that it's not just me:

It looks like these articles are no longer available, at least as that collection of Refresher Course articles. Hopefully that's not the case, but just that I could not find them with the Linn's new website.

If they're gone, that's quite a shame, as I often pointed newcomers to the hobby to that collection.

The refresher courses have been (annoyingly) renamed & moved to:

http://www.linns.com/en/insights/st...-basics.html

While the links no longer work, you can grab titles from ...

http://www.filbert.com/stamplistope...freshers.htm

... and cut & paste them to a search engine.

So googling [ It's not a stamp, but it looks a lot like one linn's ] will bring up:

http://www.linns.com/en/insights/st...Baadke0.html

Q/ Did I mention annoying?

http://www.linns.com/en/insights/vo...nline-w.html ... their explanation

Why 'basics' is more 'online' than 'refresher' is beyond me, but I can tell you why it is insulting to their aging readership.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Remember, Linn's revamped their website a few months ago (personally, I don't like it as well). Nonetheless, the Refresher Course article links seem to have disappeared in the process. I checked two or three other websites that referred to some of the Linn's Refresher Course articles and those, too, are dead links.

The Wayback Machine has a March 18, 2015 copy. I didn't try very many topic links, but each that I did try were still good.

https://archive.org/web/ then plug in the URL in the OP.

Thanks for looking into this, gentlemen.

At least I didn't miss something obvious that was staring me in the face.

I'm especially grateful for the research, Ikey and Tom.

I can understand the need to rename things, and how "Basics" will improve search position over "Refresher". But the fact that there's no way to drill down to the articles without clicking page after page of "more" is silly. Sounds like this is supposed to be on a developer's list for phase 2.

Quoting from the article Ikey linked to that explains the name changes:

... In the coming months, our website will be redesigned to make it more interactive and user friendly. It will be easier to find content on the website, as well. ...

On this point at least, it certainly looks like it's 2 steps backward.

Thanks again, everyone!

Oh, one other thing: although that website is helpful with the title links (in order to Google the article title), whoever prepared that page stopped adding them in 2000.

What a shame this is that Linn's has not made this information accessible.

Hey everyone,

My name is David and I currently handle the marketing for Linn's Stamp News.

As some of you have noticed, Linn's website has been redesigned and is undergoing constant upgrades. I would love to get some feedback from the members here on what you like or dislike about the new site. Linn's has always prided itself on listening and interacting with our readers---so now is the time to voice your opinion! It sounds like some of you have already been in contact with our developers, which is great to hear!

The old and new refresher courses are now located under INSIGHTS (and as ickeyPickey put it, have been "annoyingly" renamed Stamp Collecting Basics):

http://www.linns.com/en/insights/st...-basics.html

All of the old URLs will now work, so feel free to search for your favorite article using old links. Also, Philatarium is correct in that although these articles will remain under "Stamp Collecting Basics", the developers have been hard at work optimizing the search function to make this section, and all others, more user-friendly.

Please continue to check out the site in the coming months, as new articles and features will be added daily. Also, do not hesitate to reach out with questions/comments/concerns, I would love to hear from you guys. Thanks!

David

Q/ Why is 'basics' more 'online' than 'refresher'?

Q/ Why not insert one line of html to re-direct each of the old links to its new address?

Cheers,

Hey ikeyPikey,

I'm not sure it's a question of 'more online', rather, it's just more descriptive of the actual articles. I wish I had a better answer for you...

In regards to your second question, all of the old links now re-direct to the new site. So you should be able to find any refresher course/stamp collecting basics article using an old link or title.

Hope this helps some.

David

David, Greetings:




I was - admittedly in a snarky, ill-spirited, failing-to-be-collegial manner - referring to Linn's own words, to wit:

http://www.linns.com/en/insights/vo...nline-w.html

The fact is that y'all are correct in thinking that, for example, 'basics' is more likely to appear in a search string than 'refresher', and that adapting your column titles to search behavior is a better strategy than waiting for search behavior to adapt itself to Linn's.

(In the Olden Days, we would solve this problem with meta tags, but The World's Primary Search Engine has been ignoring them for years, with good reason.)

It strikes me that 'refresher' is more courteous way of talking to your readers but, really, who cares?

The article-by-article links at http://www.filbert.com/stamplistope...freshers.htm re-direct to the site, yes, but not to the individual articles. Article-by-article roll-over would have been simpler if the html file names had not also been changed, but it is still doable: duplicate the old directory structure, insert one line of re-direct code at the start of each article, etc.

Over the years, many authors have written documents that linked to a specific article at Linn's; it seems to me to be an elementary courtesy to see that all of those old links still point directly to the very same article at Linn's.

Cheers,