Dear sir, I write to inform you that publishing comnts sent by anonymous: individuels under US law you are leaving your self liabel for there coments,Tthis could be very exspensive for you if legal action was instigated Regards xxxx Att of law. [sic]
So, here’s the treasure hunt: which comment on the xkedata site prompted what looks to be a spurious “warning?” As far as I can tell, there is no law that states anything like that, indeed, the only hits I get from a quick internet search is a backwards “think of the children!” piece of legislation that has been proposed in Kentucky but is not actually law there yet.
I love that this love letter came from a German email address.
Not much has been happening here recently, I’ve been very busy as usual trying to make a bit of money (looking at my bank balance, it’s not working!).
However, I’m hoping to find a week or so sometime this summer to do some heavy lifting on the site. I have a small list of “fixes”–mostly code improvements. But what would you, as a site visitor or user, like to see? All ideas are welcome, but I can’t promise I’ll actually do any of them!
Leave your ideas below. Anything goes, this is meant as a brainstorming session–from minor changes to new additions or getting rid of dead weight.
Don’t be too surprised if you find yourself redirected at some future point from, say, “saloondata.com” to “saloon.carcrux.com” or some similar domain. It’s not some corporate takeover or anything like that, just me trying to rationalize my domain names. I occasionally get requests for new sites but finding useful domain names to play off of the “data” convention is sometimes impossible. Plus I end up spending a bunch on domain names when I could just pay for one.
Had I been thinking about this in 1996 I could have had a “cool” domain name for all this, but, alas. I own a bunch of not-fabulous-but-not-horrible “.com” domain names that might work as the core domain name: xked, carcrux, motodat, motocrux, motorcrux, collectordata.
I will definitely keep the existing domains, they would automatically re-direct.
Things have been really slow here, work has been busy and not much else is going on with the sites. I’ve been approached by a few folks over the years to run banner ads on the site, I’ve never gone through with it. Anyone have any opinions on whether this would bum them out or just shrug their shoulders?
I updated the “marketplace” eBay searches to include eBay.co.uk. Because certain cars are common over there that aren’t over here, there may be a bit more “noise” in the listings.
(And please do everyone a favor and do not patronize those fly-by-night companies that clutter up the web with their cheap plastic floor mats and cheesy seat covers, which they list for every car ever made. I swear you could enter “Vauxhall 30/98 parts” in a web search and come up with ten firms offering you oxygen sensors, floor mats and other trinkets, none of which you want to see.)
Thanks to the efforts of Paul and others, we have broken (or at least landed on) the 10,000 cars barrier on XKEdata this evening. Thanks, everyone!
And that’s despite the calendar and coffee mug “sales” (if a few over a few years is selling something, 
). The calendars and such seem to bother a few people extraordinarily. Not sure why.
Because I was on such a tight time schedule after the Ford debacle, I hadn’t got a chance to see the calendars until the samples arrived today. They’re not bad, not quite up to the quality of last year’s (I suspect calendars aren’t the first order of business at Lulu), but still pretty good.
One thing is bad, though, and that’s the holidays on the calendars themselves. They give you the options to have many different nation’s holidays on the calendar, and I opted for several different ones. I’m staring at a calendar right now that does the same…unfortunately, Lulu’s output mechanism isn’t too bright, and holidays that are shared among all of the nations overflow the date box for that day. Bah. The preview showed only the US holidays anyway, so it wasn’t too clear.
I’m resetting them to only show “US” events as that will at least not overflow the date boxes. My apologies for this snafu. It wouldn’t be the data sites calendar without one major cock-up. I revised the calendars online to correct this from this point forward.
There’s now a “captcha” for entering comments. Spammers sure take the fun out of the internet…
There are some big numbers brewing on the various car and image counts.
- Images: We now have 73,000 images across all of the sites. The XK site just passed 10,000 images!
- Cars: We now have over 16,000 cars across all of the sites. The E-Type site is creeping towards 10,000, less than 300 to go!
Thanks to everyone who adds car or photo data to the sites! Especially to be thanked is PaulS, who tirelessly seeks out cars and adds them at a rate I find astonishing.
You know, screw Ford, pardon my French. They are mistaken and I’m not going to let a bunch of…well, you probably see where I’m heading. So I’m going to switch my vending to a different online provider, and cease selling any T-shirts and the like for the time-being. But I will sell calendars.
The other online vendor’s calendars don’t seem as “fancy” as Cafe Press’ did, so they may be a bit more modest in presentation. I will also be changing the logos a bit on the calendars to eliminate ANY chance that trademarks could be construed as having been used.
I ask y’all to be patient and to please buy one or more when I have them posted for sale. They’re nice to have and they do help support the site! Price should be about the same, in the range of $15 - 25 US (that’s probably 2 Euros or $10 Canadian, at the rate the dollar has been plummeting).
