Keeping track of every Jaguar E-Type, with your help.
xkedata > blog > 2008

I was a bit tired of the eBay display in the “market” pages here, which used a standard eBay widget. No longer!

I’m now parsing RSS feeds for the “on eBay” stuff, which gives a better and slightly more flexible result. A child of this effort it the “next up” listing in the left sidebar which displays the next car on the block.

If you do any shopping on eBay, I encourage you to click a link to there from this site–the bit of cash they kick back if you win an auction almost covers the hosting costs on a monthly basis, which is great. Thanks for clicking, if you do!

If I remember and can muster the energy, I’ll post a here-is-the-past-30-days Google Analytics report on the blog every once in awhile. I have no idea how this compares to other similar enthusiast sites. We’re not all that extensively linked and I currently exclude search bots from the car pages, which eliminates tens of thousands of pages from search indexes.

Beware of the “totals” row, as the unique visitor count is probably artificially inflated as folks tend to go from site-to-site via the menu at upper right (which, by the way, is an excellent way of seeing the total cars and photos on the various sites, it’s always up-to-date).

I threw out the percentage increase for the Coventry Racers site when calculating that totals column, as it’s an anomaly, having just launched within this last month. The XJ6 site is similarly fresh, though from the activity on it I expect it awaits a fate similar to the relatively moribund XJS site.

As you may have seen, the 2009 Calendars are now available. I encourage you to check them out and buy one if you enjoy the site. I guess with the economy in the crapper it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that sales are far slower than last year…but hopefully things will pick up.

One reason the slow sales is bothersome is that most sales then come from people whose cars are featured, which feels fairly sleazy to me–like I’m one of those guys who takes a snap of people at a tourist attraction and then tries to sell it to them. “Hey, your car is in the calendar…oh, by the way, would you like to buy one?”

“Slow” is not a euphemism; last year I sold about 150 calendars total, so to slow from that…would make them much like the “donation” button. One person per year has clicked that–seven donations in seven years. That said, I really do appreciate those who have donated, you have my undying gratitude. (I hope jag-lovers does better than this!)

According to a friend in the know, the only real way to raise funds from something other than advertising is to either

1. Have a beg-a-thon every once in awhile, or
2. Or charge something in exchange for “premiums”

The calendars are about as close to a beg-a-thon as I’m comfortable getting at the moment, and I have no idea what would constitute premium content on these sites. Mostly naked women lounging on vintage Jaguars–for a price? Throwing lots of ad screens for dubious products between every page and photo which you could remove by paying a fee? The former sounds good, but I don’t really have a stock of mostly-naked women, or working vintage Jaguars, for that matter. The latter sounds…less than ideal.

Check out our newest site, still in its infancy, but also pretty cool: Coventry Racers, a site dedicated to the C-Type, D-Type, XKSS and Lightweight E-Type factory race cars from Jaguar.

I can now add video to the site if you can tie it to a specific chassis and it’s embeddable from one of the major video sites. Just drop me an email at the contact link below with a link to the video and what car number it is.

When you search for cars now, you can change between the age-old table format and a screen of slides showing a photo of the cars in your search results, if they have one.

I’m in the process of readying a site about C-Type, D-Type, and E-Type factory race cars. As part of that, I have removed the Lightweight E-Types from the regular Series 1 group and placed them in their own, which can be found by searching for either their car number or by going to the search form and selecting “E-Type Lightweight” under the “series” label.

In the cases where someone has noted a car’s original English registration number in the “Factory Notes” field, you can search on this using the search form, now. No guarantees, as not everyone has filled those in, but it’s our current system.

Finally, if you comment on the car sites frequently, feel free to drop me an email, and I’ll share a page I wrote which will help make that slightly less painful.

Having been prompted a few times now by folks to launch a site for S1, S2 and S3 Jaguar XJ6 cars, well, I have–check out XJ6 Data. At the moment there are only three cars and a few photos, which was a test of the system.

Mark Scotton, who is putting together a site called brownslanejaguar.com to concentrate on these cars was the most recent person to prompt me about this, and has intimated that he might become the “pauls” of the XJ6 Data world. In any case, any and all participation will be welcome!

Would there be any interest in a dayplanner type of desk calendar instead of the wall calendar? I’m thinking it would be a 7.5″ x 7.5″ coil-bound book, with a photo left opposite a week’s worth of planning space, right.

This would mean 52 photos (I would probably do all Jaguars, XKE, XKs, Saloons combined in one book) but because of the smaller photo size, I could use images straight from the site without having to chase people down.

If I did a vertical book (6″ x 9″), I could have two photos on the left, meaning over 100 featured cars.

It’s actually easier for me to gather 100 photos from the site as they exist than it is to chase down 24 large format photos.

That said, would anyone buy them? I think the price would be about $25 – $30.

Congratulations to Paul and everyone who has been entering cars, XK Data today passed 4,000 cars recorded. You can see the total numbers across all the sites by dropping down the menu at upper right, but for the record:

XKE: 10572 | XK: 4001 | Saloon: 1387 | XJ-S: 1246 | Healey: 547 | Total: 17753

And photos?

XKE: 62914 | XK: 12442 | Saloon: 6661 | XJ-S: 3672 | Healey: 3202 | Total: 88891

“Best hardwood cants and hearts, industrial and low grade lumber.”

The link submission form gets spammed pretty regularly by robots putting in such choice urls as fdhlkjshlkuefm.net (advertising sex pills*), but this forest-products link seemed to be entered by a human.** Just weird.

What person looking at a car enthusiast site thinks to themselves “ah, a perfect market for our timber products!” It’s bad enough that we get lots of requests to link to el-cheapo Toyota parts, at least that’s vaguely understandable…

Speaking of which, if you have any links that you like that aren’t on the sites but which are directly relevant, by all means submit them.

* Old car fogeys must be a natural market for sex pills, seeing as my Octane magazine has flyers for them stuffed into it (so to speak) every month.
** I’m not convinced “SEO” specialists are human.