About this site (about two sites, to be more exact).
This is the description of two sites - http://phillumeny.onego.ru and http://museum.phillumeny.ru - the first is slowly moving into the second (though, not all)
This site is dedicated to the images on the matchbox labels - the small artworks that most of us do not pay much attention to.
But they
reflect our history, our
likes and
dislikes
and
sometimes they are
real artworks in
themselves.
Only a small
part
of their variety
can be
shown
here (there were issued at least two millions of different matchbox labels, matchcovers and printed boxes and their number is constantly growing) . And
I do hope you
will
like
them.
Initially only labels of site author were presented,
but gradually there formed the Virtual Matchbox Labels Collectors' Club and now nearly half of the labels on display I
have not ever seen - they were presented by other phillumenists and even people not deceased by this "craziness" from all over
the world. In 2003-2005 Alexey and Andey Chekushins were also working on the project, creating new pages.
You can learn more about the site autor here.
Technical issues
The Virtual Museum was inisially designed so that the near-real-size
images
were to be
seen at 800x600 resolution on 14" and 15"
monitors.
Inisially the site was designed with the orientation on MS Explorer 5.5+ or Netscape Navigator 6+. Browsers based on Gecko engine (Mozilla, Netscape and Firefox) are more strict in following W3C recommendations, so pages created before April 2005 may be shown a bit incorrect in them. Most other browsers (alas, including Opera) do not fully support DHTML and are not able to work with the site.
For easier navigation (on the pages created before August 1st2004) set the brouser's view font size to smallest or small - it will not affect readability but would not interfere with menu sizes inside iframes.
I also recommend to install support for all languages as the text on the pages with enlarged labels is now presented (where I can) in native languages.
To read properly the enlarged pages with the labels of the Russian Empire you will have to have Palatino Linotype Unicode font installed (included in Windows 2000 and up)
Site history
The first pages of the "Stanislav Dmitriev virtual matchbox collection" were created in April 1998.
In November 3rd 2001 the site changed the name to the "Virtual matchbox labels museum" and first enlarged labels images were presented.
From August 1st, 2004 I started using the WinLIKE technology, organising the windowed interface inside the browser window. Some museum pages made in 2004-2005 have also special versions for printing.
In April 2005 I had to start revising all ealier created pages to make them look correctly in the browsers using Gecko engine. As a result in May 2005 I started totally new design, fully based on WinLIKE technology.
In November 9th 2006 I changed site design to the new one, still based on WinLIKE technology, developed by Anna Kochetova (seem to be the 9th design version - hope the last one). In direct call some pages may produse a bit distorted look - this will be cured with the time.
From December 21st 2006 all new and updated pages (exept for those with the enlarged images) have a built-in automatic translation into French, German and Spanish.
From July 2007 the museum part of the Virtual matchbox labels museum is being moved to http://museum.phillumeny.ru
Some statistics
During this time more than 800 exposition pages presenting over 7500 labels from 73 countries were created in English and in Russian (total number of the pages on the sites is over 13000!)
For the last year every month the sites are visited by more than 8000 unique surfers, more than 25000 pages are opened monthly.
