Keeping track of every Jaguar E-Type, with your help.
xkedata > blog > 2007 > 02

Hopefully you think the new title bar, with visible car and photo tallies for all of the sites in “prettier” tabs, is neat–I do! I apologize in advance about the small type in the tabs–I try to keep the type on the site a reasonable size but this particular application has a lot of info in a small space.

You now cannot access the email form directly, nor can you use the form more than once every few minutes. If I think of anything more clever, I’ll be doing that as well. At least you can be assured they didn’t actually get your email address, that remains hidden at all times. Only about 15 people got the spam, but they have my apologies. Sigh…

This spam attack came from a Netherlands IP via someone who had French set as their language. The reply address was yahoo.fr (though all of that can be and probably was spoofed).

I was excited to see an influx of people today, almost twice the normal traffic. Alas. Spammers found one of the forms, and I assume they then tried to find a way to exploit it. If you try to access a page directly that has a form on it without clicking on a link from this site, you’ll possibly be bounced to the front page now. Clicking on a link to get there via the left nav will work. (If you intentionally obfuscate the referer string, though, you won’t be able to get there.)

Update: Speaking of spammers, they’ve now figured out how to use the email form…to do this, they have to find a page with a link to it and then click on a link, they can’t just randomly choose names. I’m sorry if you received any and I’m working on killing the process.

With the launch of XJS Data, I’m considering consolidating all of these sites onto one domain name, with sub-domains. The old names would work forever, but new sites could be added without worrying about the availability of names…for example, I own “collectordata.com,” and the sites could be:

• xke.collectordata.com
• xk.collectordata.com

Etc., etc. This blog and a directory could then be hosted at plain-jane collectordata.com. Any thoughts?

Well, another flavor of the data sites has appeared: www.xjsdata.com, covering, surprise! the Jaguar XJ-S. Larry Harris is our resident XJ-S enthusiast and will probably be the most active seeker of XJ-S cars to record. The site launched last night so there isn’t much data as of yet, and, as usual, probably more than a few bugs.

The change in car numbering a bit into the model’s production run makes life interesting, not to mention the two different types of VINs used by Jaguar (and possibly other manufacturers, I’m not much into the “modern” car scene!). For the first three years of production, the XJ-S was numbered much like later E-Types and Saloons; in 1978 they introduced modern-ish VINs and in 1981 they went all the way to a full 17-character VIN.

XJ-S cars were also stamped (apparently, again, I don’t have one in front of me) with two different numbers if they’re North American exports: the one in the windshield and a different number on the firewall, while the rest of the world only got the firewall number. I decode and allow for both, though I add “SAJ” to the front of the firewall number as it’s implied and it makes sorting easier.

I’d be happy to hear just how screwed up this analysis is (and how I should adjust the site accordingly), just leave me a note here. Always open to learning more.

This site is hosted on a shared server. We’re upgrading our account to accommodate the more than 4 gigabytes of photographs we now host, so there may be some very minor tremors as a result. However, site performance should be increased a bit once the upgrade is complete.

Are there really that many people desperate to do something about their plumbing, so to speak?

Anyway, added some rudimentary spam filtering to comments on the site, so hold those jokes about “miracle” drugs.