WildWinds News
April 22 2022: I am spring cleaning the RIC folders of wildwinds. There are so many entries with e.g. "11 examples" under which 10 of the 11 examples are small, dark, illegible or just downright grotty. So I am just keeping a maximum of 3 examples and deleting the rest. This also requires changing a lot of the Sear 5 files.
December 2021: The size of the website is now so close to the maximum capacity of a DVD that I am getting errors in my DVD burning program and am having to throw new DVDs away. So the website is now being copied onto 16 Gb sticks. The price of a stick is higher than a DVD of course, but at least there is no waste, and I got a good price for sticks from a Swiss supplier, so the price of the USB stick is the same.
When you order one, please send me an email to dane@wildwinds.com and let me know your chief numismatic interests and which languages you understand, so I can add some appropriate pdfs.
Aug. 20th 2021: I realised that rather a large chunk of the 5 Gb of the website server space was being taken up by the double entries in the /SE and /brit folders. There is no point in having entries in both places and having your browser jump to and fro to find the English coins, so I have been moving all the /SE files and adding them to the /brit folders, many later types with full legends and proper descriptions, then deleting them from the /SE folder. It'll take a few days yet until they are all done.
May 3rd 2020: A new wildwinds DVD is available. I was wondering whether it might not be more practical to put the files on a USB stick. It would cost a bit more (USB sticks are more expensive than DVDs - you don't get them as free gifts in cornflake packets yet...), but if you would like to buy the DVD on a stick rather than on a DVD, let me know.
April 23rd 2020: Wildwinds has moved to a new, faster server in England. I am sure you will all notice a difference in the speed. I noticed it immediately when I was uploading some additions by FTP, the uploading was much faster than on the previous US server. If you experience any problems, please let me know by email or Skype (Skype name on request).
March 1st 2020: I know that there are a lot of really poor quality images listed in the /sear5 directory, especially Republican coins. (Dave used to add everything that he found on ebay etc.) So I have begun to delete a lot of the poorest images to slim things down. (I found one type with 27 examples, only one of which was worth keeping.). This work is ongoing but should make the coin files sleeker.
Nov. 30th 2019: The 76,000 coins mark was reached in November 2019.
June 1st 2019: For owners of IPads, IPhones and other Apple devices, a friend of Wildwinds has kindly permitted me to put his free software/app on wildwinds. All you need is a freebie app from the AppStore to use it. See Information, screenshots, download link and initial access info.
May 14th 2019:
The wildwinds server costs run to over $2,000 per year. This is for a secure, dedicated server. If you want to help to avoid wildwinds having to switch to a slower, cheapo and more vulnerable shared server, please consider making a small donation. The Paypal address is wildwinds.contributions@gmail.com.
January 2019
The 75,000 coins mark was reached in January 2019. So thankyou to everyone who has contributed images to wildwinds.
I am going to try and get the really good search engine program that I bought for the Wildwinds DVDs, to work on the website. I keep getting a permissions or access error message which I need to sort out, but when it's working it'll be really great and will work with Boolean searches (using AND and NOT).
June 10th 2017:
I began removing the entries in the Sear Greek folder. As with the old Sear (1988) directory, many of the images are from the late 1990s, really poor, tiny or just plain incorrect. It will take a while until this job is finished because I am trying to find nicer versions of the images and add these to the Greek city folders to replace the old ones.
October 25th 2016:
With 73,100 having been reached on 1st October, I decided to make a new version of the wildwinds DVD. Since the last one in Jan/Feb 2016 I have installed a new PC with Windows 7 (my beloved XP is still in use in my library upstairs, bless it's little cotton socks).
Several of my trusty old programs (some dating back to Windows 95!), which worked perfectly on XP 32 bit, either could not be installed on my new Win7 64 bit, or they didn't work even in XP mode.
Because over 100,000 html files need to be modified for the DVD (to make the links point to the DVD's folder structure and not to the website's structure) and the top section had so many tiny differences which couldn't be dealt with use search and replace programs, I made the top lines of the script into a separate entity and now it is called up using a short command on the html pages, (so next time I make a new DVD version I just need to replace that command which is identical on all html pages - and no more 4 days spent messing about hunting down variations.)
The width of the top strip might be too narrow for some of you. It depends on your display resolution settings. The higher the resolution, the narrower the strip. I will be happy to receive any feedback about this.
March 8th 2016:
We hit the 72,000 coins mark a few days ago ! That's over 17,000 more than when I took over wildwinds when Dave passed away. Actually it is more than 17,000 new coins because I have been getting rid of a lot of the poor or tiny images and have been clearing out the old Sear 2008 pages, because that book has now been superceded by the 5 new Sear volumes.
I was at the Numismata show in Munich at the weekend and it was lovely to meet up with some of the owners of stores who have kindly given me permission to use their coins over the years, too many to mention here. One great moment was when my friend John Aiello took me to dinner with "BCD", one of the greatest numismatists and collectors of our time.
I also visited the Staatliche Münzsammlung (Bavarian State Coin collection) and of course although not all of their massive collection (SNG Munich) is on display, those that are on display are very impressive. They also sell some books, so I bought the Overbeck book of lead tesserae for the bargain price of 15 Euros (I've seen it for sale on ebay and Amazon for over 40 Euros).
October 1st 2015.
I just checked my xls list of wildwinds content numbers and can tell you all that the following numbers of coins have been added so far in 2015:
  • January: 350 coins added
  • February & March: 425 coins added
  • April: 204 coins added
  • May: 109 coins added
  • June: 134 coins added
  • July: 108 coins added
  • August: 215 coins added
  • September: 217 coins added

The biggest differences in folder numbers since January 2015 are imperial coins (including Provincials) with nearly 1,100 additions and Greek civic coins with nearly 510 additions. 370 coins and their entries have been removed or moved from the old Sear 1988 folder and 26 grotty examples have been removed from the RSC folder.
August 8th-9th 2015
This weekend I uploaded a few imperial and lots of Provincial coins which have been waiting in my "to add" folder since June.
Cities with new entries are Abdera (Spain), Alexandria, Anchialus, Antandrus, Antioch (Pisidia), Antioch (Syria), Apollonia Illyria, Apollonia Mordiaeum, Ascalon, Attaleia, Bagis, Caesarea, Caesarea Panias, Carthage, Creteia-Flaviopolis, Dionysopolis, Elaea, Ephesos, Gordus-Julia, Hadrianotherai, Hierocaesarea, Hyrkanis, Isinda, Kios, Magydus, Markianopolis, Maroneia, Mopsus, Mostene, Nicaea, Nikopolis, Perga, Perga, Philadelphia (Lydia), Philippopolis, Sagalassos, Saitta, Sala, Sardes, Serdica, Side, Stratonikeia-Flaviop., Tabae, Tarsos, Tegea, Temnos, Thessaly Koinon, Thyateira, Tralles, Zela and Zephyrion.
There are some additional civic city coins waiting (not provincials) which should also be online soon.
June 16th 2015
At random intervals I am getting rid of all the coins in the old (1988) Sear list. These are the coins listed in the /sear/ directory.
Many of the coins in that /sear/ directory are either too small and illegible, or in very poor condition or the description and/or attribution is incorrect. Nicer ones are being used to replace poorer ones on the appropriate emperor's page.

I am doing this when I have time, sometimes during the Swiss daytime, sometimes at night, so it is possible that, if you happen to be looking at one of the /sear/ pages (/sear5/ pages are not affected) images, text or the html page may suddenly disappear. This is because the page you are looking at was overwritten when I uploaded the new files, whilst you were viewing.
In addition, I just received the new Sear Volume 5 (Constantine II to Romulus Augustus) but it will take ages to add the new Sear references to the emperors' pages.
If anyone with the new Sear Vol. 5 would like to help, just pick an emperor and let me know. All you need is a text editor (not Word or similar because these add lots of excess lines to the html code, but a genuine text editor such as NoteTab, NoteTab Pro or similar which saves files 1:1.