I’m currently working on a few things as I find the time. Here’s the current list:
New Features
- New & improved interactive color charts
This is going to be pretty incredible but is also consuming a lot of time. I’m hoping to roll out a test version in June.
- A light redesign of the site(s)
This is mainly to allow a bit wider layouts, clean up search forms, place common navigation in obvious places, etc. The general look and feel will remain very similar.
- Some small, unobtrusive ads
In an effort to find more time (ie pay myself/others) to accomplish some of the items on this list, and more. Ads would have to be at least generally on-topic and from reputable businesses. Get in touch if you might be interested. Of course, I have to figure out how much to charge, a complete mystery in many ways.
- Component tracker
A way to enter engine, body, gearbox numbers without knowing the car number. For example, I have an XK140 block in my shop, it should be on here in case the car exists and it could be matched to it.
Fixes & Completing the Incompletes
- Allow the early Series 1 E-Types to be entered without the “1E” prefix
- Database stats on all sites
- General knowledge articles about the cars covered (from Wikipedia, most likely) on all sites
- Finish the license plate project
- Easier entry forms (especially photo uploads)
Things I’m Thinking About
- Creating a registered user feature
The main purpose here would be to allow you to log-in for purposes of on-site bookmarking (for your favorite cars/photos), entering comments without re-filling in name fields; and other similar convenience items. There would be no charge, use it or not as you wish.
- “Likes” on photos
Not sure about this…but possibly a way to add a facebook-style thumbs-up for great photos, and some way to share with users the photos which are most liked. (Not thinking of it as a popularity contest but rather as a way for people to not miss some great content.)
- Unknown cars album
This would be a place to add photos of cars where we don’t have the chassis number. I’m reluctant to add this as it’s not all that valuable as a resource, in some ways, and I fear folks might just use it to dump photos they don’t want to spend the time entering with the right car.
What else should be on this already ambitious list?
You can now get selected RSS feeds from the “latest news” page. Look for the orange RSS icon on the sections which now have feeds.
If you are on the XJ220 site, or the XJ-S site, you can now search for the six-digit serial number using the box in the left nav without having to enter all of the VIN.
The 2010 Calendars are being proofread and should be available in the next couple of days. You can see that on the calendar page. As always, they will be $20 each, of which $5 comes back to us to help support the site.
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.
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.
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.
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.
