Keeping track of every Jaguar E-Type, with your help.
xkedata > blog > 2009 > 09

In the XKE world, I think I finally have the Series 1 and Series 1.5 cars separated according to the JCNA guidelines. The VIN decoder is set with their values, so it shouldn’t be a problem going forward. Famous last words.

I apologize about delay, I’ve known about this for awhile but have been dreading the slog though the database to correct them.

A dedicated place to record registration numbers has been added to the data fields for cars. When I display these, I hope to show them on appropriate plates to the upper right of the main data plate–you can see the effect on my car.

This is still a work in progress, so bear with me:

1. It’s going to take ages to actually go through and find the incidentally-recorded reg numbers and put them in the new field(s). There are 3500 of them.
2. I have to go through and create all of the little plate graphics for the US states, which is going to take awhile. Many thanks to RT’s Blank Plates for getting me started. The states:

   AK AL AR AZ CA CO CT DC DE FL
   GA HI IA ID IL IN KS KY LA MA
   MD ME MI MN MO MS MT NC ND NE
   NH NJ NM NV NY OH OK OR PA RI
   SC SD TN TX UT VA VT WA WI WV WY

3. I need to add country flags to the non-US generic reg plate when they’re displayed, so we can tell them apart.
4. I probably need to do some font fiddling to accommodate #3
5. There is now only room for three plates to be displayed. I need to figure out where the overflow goes if there are more than three. Right now they’re saved but not displayed. Solution: If there are more than three plates recorded, the entire list will be displayed below the data plate.
6. The search form does not yet use the new fields, so for awhile it will return wonky results

Notes:

• The little US plates are going not be exactly correct. They are meant to show what kind of plate would have been on that car when it was new in that state. They don’t actually reflect the age of the registration number.
• If the “title year” of a US reg car is not recorded, I cannot display a reg plate that is age appropriate. Right now, it’s going to default back to the generic black plate.

Don’t be too surprised if this takes awhile to get settled. Watch this space to see how things are progressing–I’ll cross them off as I get them done.

I’ve finally eliminated one clunky part of the search, so it may be mildly sped up. At the same time, I’ve added country flags to the search results to show where a car was last seen.

When you go to the “browse cars” section via the left-hand menu and submit a search, the table you’re presented with is now sortable–just click on the column labels which are red. You can reverse the order by clicking on the arrow that appears next to the active column. A minor change, but hopefully useful!

Once again we present one of our occasional month-long snapshots of traffic to the various data sites; this is reflecting changes from the previous 31 day’s totals.

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).

Anyone have any objections about perhaps finding a small column of directly related adverts on the right side of the site? I’m contemplating this as a way to get this site off of this shared server and onto a dedicated box.

Then again, I have no idea if anyone would advertise (I’m thinking of marque specialists here), so it may be a moot point! If you are a potential advertiser, send me an email via the link at the bottom of the page.

I also have fixed the issue where large images would upload and then not show up in the processing page. Allocating a bit more RAM did it, though that was more complicated than expected.