New Year, New Look

As you might have noticed, the currency references have been updated with a new design.  It is cleaner and works much better on mobile devices, which represents just shy of 50% of all site visitors.

Site Template

The Old
The color scheme originally came from me sampling colors from paper money - federal reserve notes, silver certificates, and red seal notes.  Clever, right?  Well, I got sick of the red clashing so much.

The New
Goodbye red.  Enter softer blues, grays, and beige.

Star Note Tables

The Old

The New
A common complaint about the old star note tables was that it's not easy to know which run a serial number belongs to.  Instead of having the run number and FRB on the X/Y axis, I decided to list all print runs per series down in the order of FRB and run number.  There is now more information available per star note run, hopefully making these pages more useful.

Another benefit is that the data is tied directly to the Star Note Lookup.  If I have to add a run or fix an error in the SNL, the update will also update the star note tables.  That's awesome because keeping the tables updated used to be a tedious process I never wanted to do.  Now, keeping everything up-to-date and synced is easy!  Yay!

 

 Star Note Lookup

The Old

The New
The lookup works much better on mobile now.
The biggest change is in the code running it.  I wrote a RESTful API tied to a backbone.js frontend.  For example, with the right credentials, you could do:

GET http://api.mycurrencycollection.com/v1/star-notes?denomination=1&series=2003&serial_number=B00123456*

and it would return something like:

[
    {
        "id": 27,
        "denomination": "1",
        "series": "2003",
        "prefix": "",
        "frb": "B",
        "run_number": "1",
        "serial_number_start": 1,
        "serial_number_end": 3200000,
        "run_size": 320000,
        "total_printed": 5760000,
        "production_month": "1",
        "production_year": "2004",
        "comments": "",
        "has_gaps": false,
        "fr_number": "1928",
        "created": null,
        "updated": null,
        "production_facility": "Washington DC"
    }
]

It means that I could, in the future, expose the data I've collected to other developers to create their own apps, tools, and analyse it in their own way.

Long Story Short

I hope you like it.  If you see any problems or have suggestions, please put them in the comments.