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.
If you’d like to be more directly involved in helping with the site, please drop me a line. Larry H. is doing a great job finding XJ-S cars, and of course Paul S. is the king of E-Types, XKs, and Classic Saloons. The Healey site currently is an orphan–if they’re a passion of yours and you have some free time you just can’t find anything to do with, well…
Fast approaching! Pretty remarkable.
(It’s an interesting contrast to watch the Saloon eBay auctions versus XK and E-Type. It always seems that the majority of saloons are restoration projects, while most of the sports cars have already been restored at least once.)
As a few users have found out, there are always some surprises when I set up a new system, in this case, the decoding of VIN numbers.
For one, tonight a user presented me with a VIN for an XJ-S that has an assembly plant code of “K.” They should all be “C” as far as I know, and “K” doesn’t even map out to a modern Jaguar plant. Anyone have an idea?
I also need to do a better job of sorting search results with the early and late style cars, which I promise to get around to one of these decades.
Update: After 1987 that VIN position was swapped for emissions control specification. Of course, with that particular set of VIN numbers there’s no date code so you can’t do a straight-up check to see whether the position is factory or emissions… The standard North American VINs look smarter and smarter.
You’ll note that the left nav bar now sports a “sponsors” addition. This site is a big-time money losing proposition, which is perfectly in keeping with my experiences with Jaguars in general, and not something I fret too much about. Still, money does buy happiness parts (or pays hosting, more to the point).
The Cafe Press store helped pay the hosting a bit, but pretty much everyone who needed a T-shirt has one, and calendar sales this past season were pretty flat–surprisingly so, I felt. (On the other hand, because Cafe Press charges me retail for calendars, to make a few dollars for the site they end up costing you $20 apiece, which is pretty steep tribute–so perhaps the slow sales are understandable.) The store is still there, and I encourage you to see if there’s something you can’t live without. I’ll probably still add new items occasionally; heck, I need T-shirts now and again. Plus the store was the subject of some ribbing from another site, which amused me to no end.
When I put together the “on eBay” page it was done as a service for me site users to enjoy. To use their widget, however, I needed to join their affiliate program, and they kick back a bit of their auction fees if people bid and win items if they arrive at eBay via a link from this site. If you’re an eBay shopper, please consider using this site as a launching point for your forays into the wilds of online auctions–it doesn’t cost you anything and I’ll never be able to hang out with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet if you don’t.
Motorbooks was another link offered by the affiliate program that seemed a good fit here, and they have several books I’ve never seen, so I’m giving them a shot. I suspect I’ll still have to keep my day job. Thanks to anyone who does visit and purchase goodies from our sponsors.
Web advertising programs are exciting to think about but the math is daunting. You will not see the ubiquitous Google ads here for that very reason…they’re considerably more intrusive, their terms of service bug me, and the return is quite meager in this particular backwater of the internet.
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?
I’ve been doing some minor tweaking of the site to improve responsiveness, but I’ve noted some general sluggishness on all of the sites I have hosted on pair.com. I’m not sure what’s going on there, but hopefully it will fix itself over time.
Happy new year to all of this site’s visitors! Last year, about 120,000 unique visitors* visited 2.5 million pages on this site. I hope these numbers increase for 2007–the more people that visit, the more car data entered, and the more we know about classic Jaguars. These sites really do become more valuable to users the more data that is present.
Let me know how your experience here can be improved, and I’ll add the idea to the suggestion box.
Some special thanks: This site really should be called “pauldata.” Paul Spurlock is tireless in his quest to add cars to the site, and I’d be willing to conjecture that at least half of the cars currently recorded have been input by his intrepid (and undoubtedly calloused) fingers. Many thanks also to Steven DuChene, Dana Brown, Dave Kerr, Larry Harris, Herve, and Chuck Goolsbee for their continued efforts on behalf of the site. Thanks to Philip Porter, Urs Schmid and Malcolm McKay for their support, as well as my many friends on the Jag-Lovers forums, even if I’m not the favorite son of the XK group!
I hope everyone has a prosperous 2007…who knows, maybe I’ll even get my E-Type back on the road.**
* It should be noted that some of these “unique” visitors were the same person visiting the site at intervals far enough apart that the server software thinks they’re “new” (generally about a month between visits).
** Hah!
This month has been very busy, so I haven’t had a lot of time to devote to working on the various data sites. The new year should bring a couple of cool new features, namely an XJS register and hopefully the World’s Most Complete Jaguar color chart. Well, the latter is questionable, but we’ll be making a stab at it.
Happy holidays to everyone, and many thanks to those who visit and those who contribute their time and money to helping keep this site going!
