Keeping track of every Jaguar E-Type, with your help.
xkedata > blog > 2006 > 11

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!

You’ll now notice in the upper right next to the car search box tabs for navigating between the various data sites. What’s nice about this approach is that you can now go directly from the E-Type resources to the Saloon resources (as an example). If you’re looking at a particular car or photo, the tabs just take you to the front page of the other site. It has the added benefit of making the left nav bar a bit shorter.

In theory, this site displays as follows.

• Exact rendering: IE7, Firefox (any version for Windows), and Safari.
  (Firefox for Mac should be in that group, too, but surprisingly it often has “issues”)
  Users of these browsers should see what I intended: The top, left and bottom nav bars are stationary while the page content scrolls behind them. (Except in this blog, where the bottom nav bar sometimes lives its own merry life at the bottom of the content instead of the bottom of the browser window.)
• Reasonable rendering: IE6
  IE6 users see the site with the top, side and bottom bars scrolling with the page content. The left nav does not continue below the depth of the initial screen.
• You-probably-cannot-read-this awful rendering: IE5.5 and below, any Netscape below version 6, any IE for Macintosh
  Sorry. Less than 1 in 200 users visit with any of these browsers, and they’re now well past their prime.
• Unknown: Opera, Konquerer and other small-market-share browsers. I suspect the latest version of Opera works, but the others, not so sure.

If you’re in the first two groups and you get unexpected results (like the bottom nav bar appearing in the middle of the page) please drop me a line with your browser and operating system. No guarantees, but I’d at least like for IE6 users to not have any issues, as that’s still the majority of you.

One sure-fire solution: use Firefox.

I just launched a new data site to cover classic post-war Jaguar saloons, from immediate post-war through the XJ6 of 1968, from the Mk. IV to the last of the sixties saloons.

Visit it now: Saloon Data

Please let me know if you find any bugs…I’ve already stamped out a few serial number bugs, and I need to better define the colors list. I’m also trying to determine if I need a mechanism to record duotone paint schemes, or whether that can simply be done in the comments.

I’ve got a couple of new designs available in the store, one featuring an XK-120 coupe and another just with the XK Data logo. I’m also trying these on black, but I suspect I’ll have to do a bit more work on the dark side–order a black shirt at your own risk until I’ve had a chance to buy one and see how they look!

671792

Jeff Schellinger’s XK 120, #671792, is certainly a handsome machine for having been found “derelict in a soybean field” and having been a former dirt track racer! (I’m going to feature a few of the cars I used in the calendar in the next couple of weeks, this is the first one, though a couple of the cars have already been featured.)

If only I could get Steve Martin to advertise them. In any case, there are a passel of calendars, both XK and E-Type, available in the store. Check them out!

In preparing the site for IE7, I broke this blog in IE6. It should be mostly better now, or at least close to what it was!

Reader Tad sent me a link to some great YouTube videos, here’s the first one. Enjoy!