Keeping track of every Jaguar E-Type, with your help.
xkedata > blog > 2006 > 12

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!