Keeping track of every Jaguar E-Type, with your help.
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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.

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.