Keeping track of every Jaguar E-Type, with your help.
xkedata > blog > category > updates > page > 2

I was 150 messages in arrears, some dating back to April. The shame. However, you lot are pretty well used to it by now, I would expect.

Everyone likes “milestone” numbers (such as reaching the next thousand of something), I thought I’d offer up a word of congratulations and thanks for those round numbers recently seen around here. Since roughly the new year we have passed:

• 13,000 E-Types
• 6,000 XKs
• 30,000 total cars across all the sites
• 150,000 total photos
• 16,000 Saloon photos

In addition, we’re closing in on 100,000 E-Type photos and 24,000 XK photos. I know these numbers are puny compared to what Facebook processes every day, but I feel for our little corner of the internet they’re significant.

We now have a site dedicated to pre-war SS/Jaguar cars: ssjaguardata.com. Note that this site doesn’t cover any of the Swallow-bodied cars as they were not manufactured under SS or Jaguar serial numbers. Visit it here!

You may notice more cars with photos next to their dataplate, and more exterior photos of cars in that spot.

I updated the code that governs that image to take advantage of some CSS3 features to draw the drop shadow behind the image. This means I can eliminate the very narrow width/height ratio required before. I still require a horizontal rectangle, but much “shorter” photos can be accomodated, and even a bit closer to square, though only by a couple of percentage points. Users of older browsers, especially any IE older than the current version, will not see the shadow but should still see the image.

The images are generated on the fly (selected by algorithm–not hand-picked, in case you were curious), so you may briefly see an empty box which is replaced by an image as it is developed.

In any case, it should be more interesting to browse through the cars, now.

I finally got around to killing the kind of cruddy script which fed the eBay stuff into the left bar. The new code appears much more robust. However, I forgot to change the right column on the home page, so for a few hours this evening you got to study a PHP error message if you were so inclined. Should be fixed now, and no more fatal errors in the other script, either (hopefully!).

Thanks to PaulS and PeterI, I went through the sites and deleted a bunch of duplicate cars this weekend. About 100 duplicate E-Types went away and about 20 XKs.

One day, if I can find the time, I’d like to add a “hotbox” page and the ability for site users to flag cars (with a reason) to appear on that page. So if someone views a car and knows it’s a duplicate of another, it can be flagged and reviewed by admins and other site users. Most of the time it is a mistake that needs to be deleted, but sometimes it really is not clear which car is right and which is wrong. Worthwhile to expose those and discuss them.

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.