Well, another flavor of the data sites has appeared: www.xjsdata.com, covering, surprise! the Jaguar XJ-S. Larry Harris is our resident XJ-S enthusiast and will probably be the most active seeker of XJ-S cars to record. The site launched last night so there isn’t much data as of yet, and, as usual, probably more than a few bugs.
The change in car numbering a bit into the model’s production run makes life interesting, not to mention the two different types of VINs used by Jaguar (and possibly other manufacturers, I’m not much into the “modern” car scene!). For the first three years of production, the XJ-S was numbered much like later E-Types and Saloons; in 1978 they introduced modern-ish VINs and in 1981 they went all the way to a full 17-character VIN.
XJ-S cars were also stamped (apparently, again, I don’t have one in front of me) with two different numbers if they’re North American exports: the one in the windshield and a different number on the firewall, while the rest of the world only got the firewall number. I decode and allow for both, though I add “SAJ” to the front of the firewall number as it’s implied and it makes sorting easier.
I’d be happy to hear just how screwed up this analysis is (and how I should adjust the site accordingly), just leave me a note here. Always open to learning more.
This site is hosted on a shared server. We’re upgrading our account to accommodate the more than 4 gigabytes of photographs we now host, so there may be some very minor tremors as a result. However, site performance should be increased a bit once the upgrade is complete.
Are there really that many people desperate to do something about their plumbing, so to speak?
Anyway, added some rudimentary spam filtering to comments on the site, so hold those jokes about “miracle” drugs.
I put the forums back online…not to compete with anyone else, but because there are some popular calls for a place to post messages to other site users. Also, please use the “data discussion” for feature requests, etc., etc.
I pruned a LOT of the old forums, but kept any thread that seemed to have useful info in it.
(Note: Already have spam in the not-popular-at-all forums. Expect to see them go back down permanently if they become magnets. I wrote the software, such as it is, but don’t really want to spend any time trying to prevent spam. Don’t forget, jag-lovers has great forums.)
Very minor, but I updated the flyer to reflect the latest numbers and minor design changes.
The car detail page will now tell you what the various car number prefixes and suffixes mean…for example, this Jaguar 420 displays the decoded info to the right of the data plate. Not a big deal, but it’s still nice for folks who may not know what’s what.
I also have run a script which changed all of the abbreviated US states into their “friendly” names–hopefully helping the postal-code challenged among us. And I got rid of the abbreviated form of “United States”…previous sentence excepted.
I ran a script that has “normalized” the engine, body and gearbox numbers. It wasn’t designed to catch errors, but to simply change all the “R.2512/9″, “R 2512 9″ and “R25129″ variants into standard “R2512-9″ formatted numbers (on XK engines), and to eliminate the non-alphanumeric characters from the other numbers. The result is the columns in the search results are considerably easier to read.
There are going to be a few XK-engined cars where the compression number was left off when the data was recorded, and yet the number ended in a 7,8, or 9…these “short” numbers will now read R251-7. Oh, well, the “pro” registrars are snickering but you can help–If you spot a clear mistake, you can correct it by using the “ADD / EDIT” button on the left.
No part of the existing number was discarded during this sweep, so at worst we now have an unintended hyphen in .001% of the XK-engined entries, but with a huge advance in readability for the rest.
You can now see the folks who have identified themselves as owners. (Use the site tabs in the upper right to go from list to list.)
It’s fun to read through the short bios, and I encourage more of you to sign up–if you use a nom de plume other folks can get in touch, but you remain anonymous (your email address is never revealed to any user of the site–even when they send you a note via the contact form).
You’ll now find a quick-link to bookmark your favorite pages with del.icio.us in the footer of most pages (in the right sidebar here in the blog), which is a handy tool for sorting and stashing bookmarks as you cruise around the web. Mind, I still think the service has a ridiculous name, but that’s why I’m eating corn flakes and the del.icio.us.ians have swimming pools full of pear nectar, which they sip while wearing solid gold hats.
I finally, after four years, took the fifteen minutes to fix the “breadcrumbs” which is the little trail of links that appears in the top bar. Before, if you got more than one page deep it broke. Seems to actually be working, now.
