Who is the webmaster
Ben Nieborg, the webmaster of Stamp Encyclopaedia Poland, is a 40 year old married Dutch man, living in The Netherlands, has no Polish relatives.
Eastern Europe
His first visit to Eastern Europe took place only one year before the collapse of the Iron Curtain in Hungary, when his parents participated in a Romania Aid program, initiated from local churches in The Netherlands. These churches organised food transports to Central Romania and East Hungary. From then on,
summer and Easter holidays were spent for privately transporting food and cloth parcels to Romania combined with holidays spent in Romania and Hungary. His first holidays without his parents were
spent in Hungary. The country being very cheap, the people incredibly hospitable and, with many culturally interesting young tourist places to visit, Hungary became his favourite travel destination. Great friendships developped and having a gift of languages, he learned to understand Hungarian. As an autodidact, he continued learning the language at home for a period of six years using books and dictionaries and writing letters to Hungarian friends. As the years passed with summer travels by public transport or hitch hiking from Sopron to Debrecen and from Aggtelek to Mohács, the focus on Hungary slowly blurred. His interest shifted towards Poland, but the reasons for this are shrouded in mystery.
Poland
Travelling by public transport is a great way to get to know people. Long summer holidays were now spent in Poland, sometimes combined with the Czech and/or Slovak Republic. Old friendships faded, new ones developped. He crossed between the Poles from Poznań to Białowieża and from Hel to Bieszczady. The Polish language was learned in Poland and back home. More quickly this time, following private language courses organised by Poles in The Netherlands. He found his best friends in Poland.
Stamp collecting
But his love for Poland did not fade. He decided to combine his interest in the history of Poland and his love for the Polish language with an old childhood hobby: stamp collecting. Who collects stamps these days? Children? Not anymore. Pipe smoking and lemon brandy drinking elderly? Yes, now he had to contain
himself in a subdued enthousiasm while feeling a sense of shame for practising this stuffy old hobby.
Compiling the Encyclopaedia
He noticed that stamp catalogues didn't tell much about who or what is depicted on philatelic material. There were no decent Polish stamp websites on the internet focusing on descriptive background information about stamp images. There were hardly any decent Polish stamp websites for non-Polish speakers. Inspired by Andre Mongeon's "Stamps of Poland" pages and Bjorn Harald Bakken's "Bulgarian history on stamps" pages, he started designing his own website. The initial plan was to make the images of all Polish stamps and sheets available online and to add descriptions and translations of all things depicted on them. Although it took ages just to make the images digitally available, he managed to get his first homepage online on 10 September 2002, calling it the Stamp Encyclopaedia Poland. Stamps were initially displayed in the order used in the German Michel stamp catalogue. Initially, help was offered by people who offered scans of rare philatelic items by email, while others payed more attention to textual content. It was also suggested to give the site a more complete and a more Polish touch if the Polish Fischer catalogue was used as the main reference. He's been working on this web project for many long evenings. In March 2003, his website was awarded a vermeil Web Excellence Award by Stamp2.com. In March 2006, the site moved to a new web domain at stampspoland.nl. Today, the Stamp Encyclopaedia Poland website contains more than 2200 pages and more than 8000 images to explore (counted in November 2006).
What's next
Programming HTML in Notetab Light doesn't get the designing techniques much further. Database oriented programming in PHP/MySQL will do the trick of separating content from layout, but there's more to life than Polish stamps and a content management system. Lack of time.