Category Archives: Good reads

Posts of book reviews, or links to articles or blog posts on other websites

hobbyDB works to preserve collectible websites

The Harvey Mercheum Posted on by  

Back in January, I found the hobbyDB website. I just read this very interesting post on their blog:

When Collectible Websites die – does the Data die too?

Readers of the Mercheum Blog know that I am very concerned with the preservation of the content I have created. I do not feel that hobbyDB is a perfect fit for all the Harveyana that the Harvey Mercheum embodies, especially the various bits of corporate ephemera that I have promised to share with you. I am, however, very pleased to learn about the efforts that hobbyDB is making, and I still need to investigate how I can contribute.

What All Collectors Must Know

The Harvey Mercheum Posted on by  

I just read a great post on the Intelligent Collector website:

What All Collectors Absolutely, Positively Must Know

While some of the people interviewed were concerned with the value or authenticity of items purchased, I liked the quotes that emphasized buying what you care about. Shortly after I started the Harvey Mercheum website, I started buying every new Harvey-related item I could find. I quickly ran out of money, and did not even put a dent in the list of items I had found. I now buy items I feel are unique or otherwise important parts of the history of Harvey Comics. In short, I try to buy items that I care about.

Long-time readers of the Mercheum Blog may recall me doing an interview that was published in the Fall 2017 issue of Intelligent Collector magazine.

Create a website for free!

The Harvey Mercheum Posted on by  

WordPress hosting company WP Engine publishes a very interesting online magazine called Torque. Back in January, they wrote an article about whether you can create a website for free:

Can You Create a Functional (and Effective) Website Without Spending a Dollar?

I reached the same conclusions they did. I spend money on web hosting with Siteground, and on domain name registration with namecheap, but use the free Weaver Xtreme theme, free plugins, free CDN services from Cloudflare and free SSL from Let’s Encrypt. This seems to be a reasonable balance to me.

Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!

The Harvey Mercheum Posted on by  

It was just over two years ago that I switched the Harvey Mercheum website’s theme from Suffusion to Weaver Xtreme. Weaver Xtreme supports certain Google Fonts, and I chose Roboto Slab for titles and Roboto for text (Roboto Condensed in the sidebars). Kinsta just posted on their blog that the Roboto font family is the most popular on Google Fonts, with the Condensed style sixth, and the Slab style thirteenth. I guess I made a decent choice! My original inspiration for the combination was Brian Garnder’s post Top 5 Google Font Combinations (from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine).

Greg Ehrbar post about the Richie Rich story records

The Harvey Mercheum Posted on by  

Earlier today, Greg Erhbar posted an in-depth look at the records PolyGram made for Harvey under their Parachute label on the Cartoon Research website. The article mentions that there were five of the 33 1/3 RPM LP’s, of which three have been featured as exhibits here on the Harvey Mercheum website:

4 Great Stories

Mysteries of the Deep!

and Surprise Party!

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Kinsta blog post on redirects

The Harvey Mercheum Posted on by  

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I posted about how, while http: versions of hyperlinks to the Harvey Mercheum website will redirect to https:, the redirect is an extra step and slows the process down. I just finished reading a post on Kinsta‘s blog about redirects, and in it, they show measurements of just how much a redirect slows down page load time. You can read the full post here:

WordPress Redirect – Best Practices For Faster Performance

And yes, I use SiteGround not Kinsta for my hosting, but it does not matter to me where a relevant and well written blog post originates.

1968 Collegeville Costumes catalog on Plaid Stallions

The Harvey Mercheum Posted on by  

Halloween is just around the corner! In my childhood, the Halloween season started with a trip to the store to buy a costume. I remember shelves stacked with boxes, so many choices! Find a character I liked, then find my size. Then one year, I took a good hard look at the costumes, and realized that the character would not be walking around with their face and name printed on their chest. I never wore a boxed costume again.

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