Keeping track of every Jaguar E-Type, with your help.
xkedata > blog > 2006

This month has been very busy, so I haven’t had a lot of time to devote to working on the various data sites. The new year should bring a couple of cool new features, namely an XJS register and hopefully the World’s Most Complete Jaguar color chart. Well, the latter is questionable, but we’ll be making a stab at it.

Happy holidays to everyone, and many thanks to those who visit and those who contribute their time and money to helping keep this site going!

We’re getting closer to passing another milestone: the 9,000th E-Type should be recorded within the next two or three months–we’re just about to add the 8,700th machine (tomorrow, perhaps?). 4,000 XKs will be a much tougher slog: We just passed 3,300 and they come in more slowly than the E-Types. And the saloons site has just started but in theory is a much larger pool of cars…in theory. Watching eBay auctions for them, it seems the majority of them are project cars, as opposed to drivers or restored beauties. I imagine their attrition rate is far higher than the sports cars. Are even 10% of them left?

This time next year I hope to see 10,000 E-Types, 4,000 XKs and 1,000 Saloons. That’s still pretty exciting.

Currently, we have 12,203 Jaguars of all types recorded.

The car detail page will now tell you what the various car number prefixes and suffixes mean…for example, this Jaguar 420 displays the decoded info to the right of the data plate. Not a big deal, but it’s still nice for folks who may not know what’s what.

I also have run a script which changed all of the abbreviated US states into their “friendly” names–hopefully helping the postal-code challenged among us. And I got rid of the abbreviated form of “United States”…previous sentence excepted.

I ran a script that has “normalized” the engine, body and gearbox numbers. It wasn’t designed to catch errors, but to simply change all the “R.2512/9″, “R 2512 9″ and “R25129″ variants into standard “R2512-9″ formatted numbers (on XK engines), and to eliminate the non-alphanumeric characters from the other numbers. The result is the columns in the search results are considerably easier to read.

There are going to be a few XK-engined cars where the compression number was left off when the data was recorded, and yet the number ended in a 7,8, or 9…these “short” numbers will now read R251-7. Oh, well, the “pro” registrars are snickering but you can help–If you spot a clear mistake, you can correct it by using the “ADD / EDIT” button on the left.

No part of the existing number was discarded during this sweep, so at worst we now have an unintended hyphen in .001% of the XK-engined entries, but with a huge advance in readability for the rest.

You can now see the folks who have identified themselves as owners. (Use the site tabs in the upper right to go from list to list.)

It’s fun to read through the short bios, and I encourage more of you to sign up–if you use a nom de plume other folks can get in touch, but you remain anonymous (your email address is never revealed to any user of the site–even when they send you a note via the contact form).

You’ll now find a quick-link to bookmark your favorite pages with del.icio.us in the footer of most pages (in the right sidebar here in the blog), which is a handy tool for sorting and stashing bookmarks as you cruise around the web. Mind, I still think the service has a ridiculous name, but that’s why I’m eating corn flakes and the del.icio.us.ians have swimming pools full of pear nectar, which they sip while wearing solid gold hats.

Anyone want to see the old forums back? There are any number of other forums out there, I was thinking if I did put ours back up they’d be more about the general history of the cars or questions about historical data than technical help, as that seems pretty well covered.

I could fairly easily support several languages across these sites (comments on cars obviously would stay in whatever language the commentator uses, and this blog would remain in English) but I barely have English skills, let alone any other language. It would be a bit of work for me initially–but not the end of the world, and if it made the site more useful for more people, that’s very cool.

If you speak English and another language into which you’d like to see the site translated, drop me a line or leave a comment here (as in, you’d be willing to translate!). I’m open to all languages–except Valley Girl and L33T!

I finally, after four years, took the fifteen minutes to fix the “breadcrumbs” which is the little trail of links that appears in the top bar. Before, if you got more than one page deep it broke. Seems to actually be working, now.

I imagine a lot of you are like me (better looking, though–I can see that from here), occasionally checking out eBay for cars or parts, even if you’re “just browsing.” After all, how else can you keep tabs on how much a copy of Dr. Haddock’s book is now selling for? We’re too polite to note that you’re greedily eying your own copy of the sacred tome at this moment–which was purchased for $19 not so long ago.

So, ostensibly as a public service, but mostly for my own amusement, I’ve added a tab to the left bar which pulls up pages of eBay auctions of interest to these sites’ users–both cars and parts:

[ E-Type Cars ] [ Parts ] | [ XK Cars ] [ Parts ] | [ Saloon Cars ] [ Parts ]

There are a lot of things to note:

1. There is no way I formed perfect enough queries to catch everything, so if you’re seriously in the hunt for something, be sure to do your own searching on ebay. Don’t forget to try odd spellings and different categories. It’s rare to find much listed that way these days, but you never know.
2. There is no endorsement here of anything other than providing a new time-waster for you, gentle reader. I’ve bought quite a bit on eBay and have only been mildly burned once, and even that turned out in the end. But use caution, educate yourself about common eBay scams, note that if something looks too good to be true it almost certainly is, and just generally have your wits about you. I’d guess 98% of the sellers are honest folk who aren’t out to get you, but watch out for the others.
3. I feel pity for owners of classic machines like the original S-Type who have to filter out all of the modern stuff to try and find bits. I found it incredibly difficult to get any hits without returning tons of noise…I imagine I probably excluded a few “honest” listings in the shuffle. What a pain.
4. All of the auctions and all of the listings live on eBay, including the code that runs the widget. We have nothing to do with it other than letting it appear on our page and providing it a search string. We cannot become involved in any way with your eBay transactions.
5. Read the disclaimer that lives within the eBay box. Please tell me you find it as awkwardly worded as I do!
6. Finally, full disclosure time: The only way to get the code widget is to become an eBay affiliate, which is what this site now is. That means we receive a financial reward if someone clicks through to an auction, bids, and wins–though I’m not sure exactly how much. Their examples were a bit breathless (to paraphrase):
   

   …if you sign up 2,000 users a month and 2,000 of your users win eBay auctions of $$$ value you could make [a lot!] per month…

   Are there even 2,000 people left in the world who aren’t already eBay members? 2,000 auctions won per month via this page? I feel like the last guy to sign up for a pyramid scheme, whose only “down-levels” are deep-sea denizens and perhaps some of the less sentient field mice in our hay field. It’s just my luck my down-levels are mostly now inside the resident red-tailed hawks.

I guess my message to you is twofold: Enjoy browsing the auctions, and if you’re going to pay $3.7M for a copy of Haddock’s book via eBay, please go there via the new page. The $3.70 we’ll get will be nice lunch money!