Keeping track of every Jaguar E-Type, with your help.
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Thanks to everyone who has added cars to the database! Looks like the next “even thousand” landmark might be 1,000 Big Healeys.

If you are on the XJ220 site, or the XJ-S site, you can now search for the six-digit serial number using the box in the left nav without having to enter all of the VIN.

Very soon we’ll be kicking off an exercise to gather everything that can be known about factory color information and put it all in one place. This will include not only the color photos you can currently see on some of the data web sites, but factory color codes, aftermarket codes, modern cross-references, interior color information, factory paint swatches, notes about period painting practices, the ability to sort by year, model, color family and much more, hopefully in an easier to comprehend display with the ability to add notes about specific colors.

If you think you can contribute to this project, drop me a line and I’ll add you to the small group who is working on this. If you have done research on a particular color or colors, own (and are willing to scan or have scanned) original factory color charts, or whatever may be your interest, we’d love to have your help, no matter which model or time period you may be interested in.

Visit the calendar page to preview (and purchase!) the 2010 Calendars.

(You know, I could cut the price in half if I could guarantee selling enough calendars to have them printed on a press, rather than using “on-demand” printing. But the quantities I would need to sell would be daunting, about ten times what I sell now. I don’t have a good feel for how many people refrain from buying a calendar because the price is just too steep. Would I gain a ten-fold jump in sales by cutting the price from $20 to $10 apiece? I have no way of knowing.)

The 2010 Calendars are being proofread and should be available in the next couple of days. You can see that on the calendar page. As always, they will be $20 each, of which $5 comes back to us to help support the site.

Thanks to the efforts of the good folks at Xclusively Jaguar, we now have every XJ-S Cabriolet online at xjsdata.com. This amounts to 5,013 cars, of which only about 100 were already recorded here. This is just tremendous and we really appreciate the open and friendly communication–and effort–put in by Bleasie and his colleagues.

Namely, the pay is my sincere thanks! This year there seem to be a lot of questions about why those whose cars appear in the calendar don’t get a free copy–well, here’s why…

The calendars try to accomplish a couple of things: they provide those enthusiasts who buy them with something they can hang in the garage or office featuring their favorite cars, and they raise a bit of money to help pay for things like web hosting for the various sites.

When I say a bit of money, I really mean a bit. Last year, I sold just about 100 calendars. I “profit” to the tune of $5 each; when you pay $20 for a calendar, $15 of it goes to Cafe Press. So my income from the calendars last year was about $500. (Please keep in mind this “profit” doesn’t account for the 20 hours of my time involved in producing each calendar–something I’m happy to do, as I feel like I’m giving a bit back to a supportive community. But as someone who is a professional designer, my fee would be quite a bit more than $500 for a like amount of work.)

I do appreciate every sale. Many thanks to everyone who buys a calendar!

Now, if I want a calendar for myself–for my own use or to give to others–I still have to pay Cafe Press their $15 for each calendar. (I suspect Cafe Press makes most of their money from people buying their own products.) This year I’ll be using 36 photos, and giving each owner whose car is in one of the photos a calendar would cost me over $600 (if you include the shipping costs).

The first year I did the E-Type calendar, I did just that, gave everyone a free calendar, and I just barely broke even overall, despite only giving 12 away.

If I knew I was going to sell hundreds of calendars, I could print them on a “real” printing press (rather than the print-on-demand gig we have now) and get the unit cost down considerably. But the demand just isn’t there, and I cannot afford to front several thousand dollars in the hopes that a lower price would lead to much stronger sales. It would really be a disaster (I am not a wealthy man–probably because I own a vintage Jaguar!) to be staring at boxes of unsold calendars come February of 2010.

I would like to say that the vast majority of folks who I contact about appearing in the calendar understand my dilemma, and I thank them for being gracious about it and allowing me to use their photos. And I harbor no ill will to anyone who thinks not getting a free calendar is a raw deal, I can see your point of view–if someone asked me if a photo of mine could be used in a calendar, I’d want one as well.

Believe me, I’m very sorry that I just can’t afford to do so.

There is a lot of activity on the development end of the data sites for once, though I’ve got a lot of tedious work to do as well. Here’s what’s cooking:

• Importing the entire production run of XJ-S Cabriolets into the database for xjsdata.com.
• Complete the 2010 Calendars. Will be going to the next set of selected cars if the current folks can’t get me their photos in the next few days. I have nine of the twelve E-Types and half a dozen XKs. I am considering Healey and Coventry Racer calendars, though I’m very thin on photos on both, and I’m not sure if there’s any interest in a calendar for either site.
• I still need to complete adding the small US plate graphics. Don’t expect lightning progress on this!
• I still need to move all of the old reg numbers that were recorded to the new fields. Another complicated, slow, process.
• I hope to move to a flash-based image uploader which has the advantage of allowing multiple file picks from the dialog box, and should be immune to file size problems. I’m also going to try and simplify the resulting thumbnail categorization page.
• I’d also like to get some small ads going, as I can see getting a dedicated server is definitely on the books this coming year.

I also have the bonus of all end-of-year not-data-site activities going on. Fun, fun fun.

Thanks to our friends at Xclusively Jaguar, the entire production run of XJ220 cars is in the database. I believe there is one unnumbered show car which I have no real way of recording, but the rest are there. Many thanks to Bleasie at Xclusively for his help. I have over 5,000 XJS cabriolets to enter on xjsdata, but it will take me awhile.

See user carcrux on Twitter. Does this seem useful to anyone? It posts a “tweet” when a new car is approved, or any car gets new photos posted. I imagine there would be about 10 – 30 tweets a day.

Not sure if this is useful, please let me know. If not, it was an interesting exercise…

UPDATE: I disabled this, as the number of tweets was insane. I’ll reconsider, maybe just adding RSS to the “latest” page would be a better solution.