I’ve updated the car pages to pull a photo up next to the dataplate, with some other minor re-arranging of info to accommodate the change. If you see anything funky, try a browser refresh, though I did change the version number of the CSS file–hopefully you won’t have any trouble. Another change is that browsing cars is no longer a “post data” request, so refreshing the screen isn’t so annoying.
I have tested in IE6, IE7 and Firefox. IE6 sucks, of course, but we persevered. No guarantees on any other browser.
If you’re curious as to why some cars show the photos they do, the software looks for the most recent exterior photo that falls within certain aspect ratios. Failing to find one of those, it looks for the most recent “action” photo within the same parameters. Failing that, it looks for any photo within those parameters. Failing that, it throws its hands in the air and stalks off in a huff.
The parameters are 300 pixels wide or wider; and a height which is between .66 and .77 of the width (a normal horizontal photo is .75).
Browsing cars is much more entertaining, in my opinion.
If you have a great photo of your car you would like to see on the calendar, please upload it to the site and let me know about it. I’m hoping to have these ready by sometime in September, so please do so soon. (Thanks for the encouraging words in the other blog entry about the calendars.)
Please leave a comment below if you want to suggest a particular photo.
Yet more threats of a lawsuit (again from an XK owner–not sure what that means). Hopefully this, too, will pass. If not, you might see an appeal for legal help go up on the front page, and perhaps you’d consider donating.
It’s always a demand for the name of the person who added the information, which I don’t know, obviously (what you see on the site is what is in the database, there are no hidden fields). I kinda wonder what these folks want to do with that name. Pistols at sunrise?
So, would anyone be interested in 2008 Calendars?
I was a bit surprised at how much effort I had to put forth last year to gather the 24 images I needed for the XK and XKE calendars (and many thanks to the folks who let me use their images). The printed calendars require very large originals to look decent, so it’s a bit of a chore to gather them.
I’m fairly confident I don’t have the materials needed to publish an XJS or Saloon calendar this year.
I wish the margins were better or the calendars cheaper. It feels a bit shoddy to ask $20 for a calendar, but $15 of that goes to the printer, and while the 100 calendars sold last year added $500 towards the hosting costs, obviously that’s not a fabulous return on a week’s work. I could lower the unit cost considerably by using a “real” printer, but I’d have to fork out of pocket for them up-front plus relying on me to mail them out in a timely fashion is just begging for disaster.
What do y’all think of the final panel of the 2007 XK Calendar? That type of collage takes a bit of time but also allows me to use photos from the web site at native resolution, which means I only need to go through and choose the images, and not worry about chasing folks down for their large originals. (I obviously would be hard-pressed to find time to do a bunch of them.)
Please let me know your thoughts.
I’ve posted a new section which is available from the left-hand navigation–look for “About…” This is a place to get general information about the model in question, such as a model guide, explanations of car numbers, colors, etc. A couple of these used to be available in “resources” but they felt better in a single “general info” section.
The section is also very sparse for some models. The XKE had a head start, and I hope you like my photographic model guide. And the XJ-S has a huge advantage in that Geoffrey Green, a marque expert, was more than kind to write a guide to both the models and the car numbering scheme.
If you would like to pitch in, help is always welcome!
My database server, which is shared between me and goddess knows who else, has been having a lot of issues lately. Unfortunately, site finances are just shy of being able to justify moving to a dedicated server for the data sites…anyway, if you try the site and you get an error message, try again in a bit.
Mainly thanks to the intrepid efforts of PaulS, there are now more than 1,000 Saloons on SaloonData.com.
So, mid-year, how are we doing on our end-of-year guesses?
- XKE Data
9,276 cars, 48,207 photos. Looks like it might be a bit tough to get to 10,000 cars, but 50,000 photos should be no problem.
- XK Data
3,573 cars, 8,841 photos. I’m cautiously hopeful there might be 4,000 XKs, and 10,000 photos should be the case.
- Saloon Data
1,003 cars, 3,010 photos. I’d be a bit surprised if this exceeds 1,100 cars and 3,300 photos.
- XJS Data
890 cars, 2,631 photos. I think 1,000 cars is probably about right, with 3,000 photos. Many thanks to jagman for his intrepid efforts on this site.
- Healey Data
106 cars, 774 photos. This site is an experiment (in a way) as to what happens if you just start the site from scratch without a “champion.” I seeded it with about 80 cars, and Paul has added a few. It goes to show just how much effort Paul puts in on the site. We might get to 200 cars and 1,000 photos by year’s end.
Total: 14,848 cars, 63,463 photos.
888981
Enjoy the photos Bruno has recently added of his 3.8 E-Type Coupe. Very tasty indeed.
I’ve received a fabulous batch of XJS info from Geoffrey Green. I hope to add it by month’s end…it’s really great stuff.
Sorry about the lack of updates here, but work has been keeping me busy, plus the never-ending battle against spammers…sigh.
I changed the way spam entries are attempted to be captured to make it less of a pain to add an entry about cars. I swear, I’m gonna can the forums again…we’ll see.
