Keeping track of every Jaguar E-Type, with your help.
xkedata > blog > 2009 > 10

Thanks to the efforts of the good folks at Xclusively Jaguar, we now have every XJ-S Cabriolet online at xjsdata.com. This amounts to 5,013 cars, of which only about 100 were already recorded here. This is just tremendous and we really appreciate the open and friendly communication–and effort–put in by Bleasie and his colleagues.

Namely, the pay is my sincere thanks! This year there seem to be a lot of questions about why those whose cars appear in the calendar don’t get a free copy–well, here’s why…

The calendars try to accomplish a couple of things: they provide those enthusiasts who buy them with something they can hang in the garage or office featuring their favorite cars, and they raise a bit of money to help pay for things like web hosting for the various sites.

When I say a bit of money, I really mean a bit. Last year, I sold just about 100 calendars. I “profit” to the tune of $5 each; when you pay $20 for a calendar, $15 of it goes to Cafe Press. So my income from the calendars last year was about $500. (Please keep in mind this “profit” doesn’t account for the 20 hours of my time involved in producing each calendar–something I’m happy to do, as I feel like I’m giving a bit back to a supportive community. But as someone who is a professional designer, my fee would be quite a bit more than $500 for a like amount of work.)

I do appreciate every sale. Many thanks to everyone who buys a calendar!

Now, if I want a calendar for myself–for my own use or to give to others–I still have to pay Cafe Press their $15 for each calendar. (I suspect Cafe Press makes most of their money from people buying their own products.) This year I’ll be using 36 photos, and giving each owner whose car is in one of the photos a calendar would cost me over $600 (if you include the shipping costs).

The first year I did the E-Type calendar, I did just that, gave everyone a free calendar, and I just barely broke even overall, despite only giving 12 away.

If I knew I was going to sell hundreds of calendars, I could print them on a “real” printing press (rather than the print-on-demand gig we have now) and get the unit cost down considerably. But the demand just isn’t there, and I cannot afford to front several thousand dollars in the hopes that a lower price would lead to much stronger sales. It would really be a disaster (I am not a wealthy man–probably because I own a vintage Jaguar!) to be staring at boxes of unsold calendars come February of 2010.

I would like to say that the vast majority of folks who I contact about appearing in the calendar understand my dilemma, and I thank them for being gracious about it and allowing me to use their photos. And I harbor no ill will to anyone who thinks not getting a free calendar is a raw deal, I can see your point of view–if someone asked me if a photo of mine could be used in a calendar, I’d want one as well.

Believe me, I’m very sorry that I just can’t afford to do so.

There is a lot of activity on the development end of the data sites for once, though I’ve got a lot of tedious work to do as well. Here’s what’s cooking:

• Importing the entire production run of XJ-S Cabriolets into the database for xjsdata.com.
• Complete the 2010 Calendars. Will be going to the next set of selected cars if the current folks can’t get me their photos in the next few days. I have nine of the twelve E-Types and half a dozen XKs. I am considering Healey and Coventry Racer calendars, though I’m very thin on photos on both, and I’m not sure if there’s any interest in a calendar for either site.
• I still need to complete adding the small US plate graphics. Don’t expect lightning progress on this!
• I still need to move all of the old reg numbers that were recorded to the new fields. Another complicated, slow, process.
• I hope to move to a flash-based image uploader which has the advantage of allowing multiple file picks from the dialog box, and should be immune to file size problems. I’m also going to try and simplify the resulting thumbnail categorization page.
• I’d also like to get some small ads going, as I can see getting a dedicated server is definitely on the books this coming year.

I also have the bonus of all end-of-year not-data-site activities going on. Fun, fun fun.

Thanks to our friends at Xclusively Jaguar, the entire production run of XJ220 cars is in the database. I believe there is one unnumbered show car which I have no real way of recording, but the rest are there. Many thanks to Bleasie at Xclusively for his help. I have over 5,000 XJS cabriolets to enter on xjsdata, but it will take me awhile.

See user carcrux on Twitter. Does this seem useful to anyone? It posts a “tweet” when a new car is approved, or any car gets new photos posted. I imagine there would be about 10 – 30 tweets a day.

Not sure if this is useful, please let me know. If not, it was an interesting exercise…

UPDATE: I disabled this, as the number of tweets was insane. I’ll reconsider, maybe just adding RSS to the “latest” page would be a better solution.

So it occurs to me that it would be easy enough to spit out updates of the various sites to a twitter feed. And I guess that feed could easily update a facebook “fan” page. So…

Not that many people peek in here, but would either of you find these useful? I’m a professional web developer as well as a designer, and even I cringe a bit when people spout about “web 2.0″ being the best thing since thin single-servings of bread. But if it would genuinely benefit some of you, I’m willing to give it a shot.

I suppose an alternative is to simply have RSS feeds for the “latest news” pages.

Anyway, let me know in the comments here if you’re interested in any of this. One thing I do know is that I probably wouldn’t be a great steward of a facebook fan page, the twitter updates would probably be about the only thing that would appear there.

There’s now a new “data” site: XJ220data, which deals with, oddly enough, the XJ220 supercar. It’s only been online for a couple of days, so it’s not the most complete resource out there. Yet.