Keeping track of every Jaguar E-Type, with your help.
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If you have any trouble with it, drop me a line.

Paul and I are just in the final stages of testing a new photo uploader.

The good news is it should handle large(ish) images fairly gracefully, offers the ability to select any number of images from a single dialog box, shows progress bars for each image as they upload, and the “fill in a caption” screen is cleaner, easier to use, and allows accidentally uploaded images to be deleted before saving.

The flip-side is that it uses a very small flash-based plugin to allow some of these things to happen (mainly the progress bars, multi-file selection, and better handling of large file uploads). This will be meaningless to most of you, but it does mean the nifty new tool won’t work from any device Steve Jobs has determined shouldn’t have flash (ie, your iPhone).

Anyway, I think you’ll agree it’s an improvement…once it goes live, if you encounter any problems drop me a line.

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.

If you’ve written me about a site issue or other inquiry in the past three (!) months, I hope to get to your query in the next week or so. I let correspondence accumulate until the weight of it starts an avalanche and I’m about to be buried–sorry about that!

If you use firefox, there are three “personas” I’ve created which you might enjoy using. One for xkedata, one for xkdata, and one for coventry racers. (The new Firefox 4 layout has the XKE persona looking a bit busy, I might edit it or add a new one.)

You can find them here: Carcrux personas. Enjoy!

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.

I received this the other night, and since I’ve received a few of these over the years, thought I would post it and my thoughts on it. You’re welcome to chime in.

—–Original Message—–
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2011 2:15 AM
Subject: [XKEDATA]
==========
this site should be closed down ,if any one wants to clown a car ,they will start here by typing in a chassis number and if no details come up ,bingo lets build a car

Is that easier than just finding a crappy restoration project somewhere to get a set of real numbers, including legit title documents?

If not, why would the criminals care if the car was on the site before making their clown, er, clone? Just because a car isn’t here doesn’t mean it’s missing; indeed, there have been around ten already-existing clones discovered via these sites. (Most of the time it doesn’t seem all that malicious, just sloppy record-keeping.)

It would cost at least $100,000 to build a car from scratch via parts if you had to pay for the labor. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to buy a decent one? The only cars that might be exceptions to this are the very rare variants–but the survivors and the fate of their siblings are generally well-known, anyway, and will come under pretty intense scrutiny if a new one resurfaces.

Puzzled,

Roger

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!).