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

So it occurs to me that it would be easy enough to spit out updates of the various sites to a twitter feed. And I guess that feed could easily update a facebook “fan” page. So…

Not that many people peek in here, but would either of you find these useful? I’m a professional web developer as well as a designer, and even I cringe a bit when people spout about “web 2.0″ being the best thing since thin single-servings of bread. But if it would genuinely benefit some of you, I’m willing to give it a shot.

I suppose an alternative is to simply have RSS feeds for the “latest news” pages.

Anyway, let me know in the comments here if you’re interested in any of this. One thing I do know is that I probably wouldn’t be a great steward of a facebook fan page, the twitter updates would probably be about the only thing that would appear there.

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.

I’ve finally eliminated one clunky part of the search, so it may be mildly sped up. At the same time, I’ve added country flags to the search results to show where a car was last seen.

When you go to the “browse cars” section via the left-hand menu and submit a search, the table you’re presented with is now sortable–just click on the column labels which are red. You can reverse the order by clicking on the arrow that appears next to the active column. A minor change, but hopefully useful!

Once again we present one of our occasional month-long snapshots of traffic to the various data sites; this is reflecting changes from the previous 31 day’s totals.

Beware of the “totals” row, as the unique visitor count is probably artificially inflated as folks tend to go from site-to-site via the menu at upper right (which, by the way, is an excellent way of seeing the total cars and photos on the various sites, it’s always up-to-date).

Anyone have any objections about perhaps finding a small column of directly related adverts on the right side of the site? I’m contemplating this as a way to get this site off of this shared server and onto a dedicated box.

Then again, I have no idea if anyone would advertise (I’m thinking of marque specialists here), so it may be a moot point! If you are a potential advertiser, send me an email via the link at the bottom of the page.

I also have fixed the issue where large images would upload and then not show up in the processing page. Allocating a bit more RAM did it, though that was more complicated than expected.

The sites were offline this morning as I exceeded my CPU share this AM. Many apologies!

I think these sites may finally have outgrown a shared hosting environment. My host, who I quite like, offers a managed dedicated server which would prevent these sort of problems…for roughly twice what I pay now.

So…is there anything that could be offered on these sites which you would pay a bit of money to access to help offset the cost of the hosting? Keep the current material free, but is there something you would pay to access? Or a number of records per day, or…?

This isn’t a critical, the-site-will-go-offline-or-else, decision–but the site would be steadier and things like image uploads and what-not would be smoother. Plus, because I’m a working stiff who can’t dedicate as much time as I like to these sites–if I could pay myself for a full day or two per month to work on this there would be a lot of progress (relative to right now, anyway!).

I wish I could say the “donate” button has worked, but (and I do thank the folks who have donated) only ten people have clicked it in seven years. The eBay affiliate stuff brings in enough to cover the current hosting, and, again, I thank everyone who clicks through to eBay via the links on the site (and then bids and wins an item!), but not really enough to support the dedicated box.

It’s a bit of a conundrum. To repeat, we’re in no danger of going offline, but it would be nice to sort this stuff out. I’m not really interested in non-managed hosting, as I don’t have the tech chops to manage a web server on top of everything else that goes on around here.