Tim Zinkgraf - ©2003 - Wisconsin Pottery Association

The following article appeared in WPA Press, Vol. 17, Summer 2003

Introducing WPA Member — Tim Zinkgraf

As if he wasn’t busy enough, WPA’s webmaster Tim spent a few moments explaining himself—or rather his fascination with pottery and the internet. As far as the WPA is concerned, it’s all to our benefit (if you’ve seen the web site you’ll know what we mean). Read-on for some information on Tim, surfing and searching:

WPA Press: How long have you been a member of the Wisconsin Pottery Association? How did you get involved?

Tim: My first meeting was a presentation on Muncie Pottery by Virginia Heiss in September of 1997 and I joined shortly after. I saw the ad for the meeting in the newspaper by sheer chance because I usually don't read the classifieds. I had been collecting Muncie for a couple years and wanted to learn more.

WPA Press: Have you always been a collector? If not, when did you start?

Tim: Collecting has been relatively recent activity for me. I was going to antique malls & garage sales with a friend and it was going to get boring if I didn't have some reason to do it. On a trip to a Mount Horeb antique mall, a piece of pottery caught my eye, a Muncie vase, the price was right and my collecting days began.

WPA Press: You're a member of the Wisconsin Pottery Association so presumably you collect pottery—what types of pottery do you like to collect?

Tim: I mainly collect three types of pottery: Muncie, Frankoma and World’s Fair. Muncie was great to collect in the beginning because I only found it once every month or two, which made it affordable. That changed when eBay came along, with Muncie available every day, it got expensive and it got even more expensive when the book came out on Muncie. Frankoma is a great compliment to Muncie because it's affordable and has some wonderful shapes & glazes. World's Fair pottery grew out of collecting 1933-1934 Chicago World's Fair items. The ‘33 Fair’s deco styled souvenirs was something I was attracted to and I started picking them up. Several years ago I bought a little ceramic tray that had "1933" on it because I liked it and the price was right. At the time, I didn't make the connection that it was from the World’s Fair, but it turned out to be from the Sweden Exhibit. Once I made the connection, I started to search out for World’s Fair pottery and it’s where I do most of my collecting now.

WPA Press: Do you have a favorite type of place to shop, say antiques malls? Estate sales? Flea markets? We hear you are a frequent traveler. Do you collect when you’re traveling?

Tim: Other then the occasional garage sale, I mainly shop antique malls when I travel, with my best finds in Indiana. The one city where I seem to have the most luck at finding bargains is, surprisingly, Las Vegas. Also odd, is that I found a high percentage of my Muncie in California.

WPA Press: Do you have a favorite story about some fantastic find or especially good antiquing spot that you've come across? Tim: That would be buying a Madison Ceramic Arts Flutist for a quarter at a garage sale & selling it for enough to pick up a couple of nice Muncies!

WPA Press: The Wisconsin Pottery Association has a fabulous website—and you’re the webmaster. How did your involvement as webmaster for the WPA begin?

Tim: Most of my skills are self-taught. Learning about web design has been something I've been able to do because of the WPA's website. What has helped a lot is the great information that the club supplies for the website: the interesting monthly presentations, the fabulous quarterly newsletter and the incredible yearly display at the show and sale. It really highlights all of the work that is being done by members to give people a better understanding of art pottery. Then combine it with the information that is available elsewhere on the web and it provides people with so much information that previously was only know to a handful of people. Personally, I’ve really learned a lot pottery just by being the webmaster. The website currently has over 50 megabytes of pictures and files. On an average day, the website has over 400 unique visitors. It's actually pretty basic setup with only a few tricks that I've picked up to make things a little easier to manage all that information. It's created in the easy-to-use program named FrontPage. The hardest part of the website is keeping everything organized. Over the last couple of months I’ve been re-organizing the whole site to make it possible to do things that were just impossible before. The key to it has been having only one location on the website for each pottery’s internal and external links and then just re-using it for the rest of the site. One of the benefits is being able to organize pottery companies by a region, similar to this year's show exhibit, “Ohio Spectrum”. On one page I can collect all the pages on the WPA’s website related to all of the potteries in Ohio because I can reuse information already done for each of the pottery, saving a lot of work. The biggest time saver is that instead of updating links on many pages; I only have to update one page and it appears across the site.

WPA Press: We know you’re really good at finding sources of information online. Any tips for the novice searcher that is looking for pottery information, say a favorite web site or search engine? Tim: There are three things that make searches more productive on any search engine and they work on most search engines. The first is using quotes (" ") to create phases that must be present in the search results. Typing “Wisconsin Pottery Association” in quotes in the search box reduces the results from 15,000 to about 500, which are more likely to be the results you wanted. Next is using the plus sign (+), to make sure that a search result must have the word following the plus sign. For example, if I wanted to see how many websites mention the “Wisconsin Pottery Association” and show, I’d just have the following in the search box: “Wisconsin Pottery Association” +show. This will cut the results down to 215 pages. The final tip is using the negative sign (–) to not show results that have the item after the word. Typing the following in the search box: “Wisconsin Pottery Association” + show - wisconsinpottery.org gives you all web pages that mention the show, but don’t have a link to the WPA’s website. Notice that you can exclude even websites, which can be handy. Finally a new thing on several search engines is searching images, which is a great way to visually find something.

Thanks for all the tips, Tim! And keep up the great work!

Kari Kenefick, WPA Press Editor