So, would anyone be interested in 2008 Calendars?
I was a bit surprised at how much effort I had to put forth last year to gather the 24 images I needed for the XK and XKE calendars (and many thanks to the folks who let me use their images). The printed calendars require very large originals to look decent, so it’s a bit of a chore to gather them.
I’m fairly confident I don’t have the materials needed to publish an XJS or Saloon calendar this year.
I wish the margins were better or the calendars cheaper. It feels a bit shoddy to ask $20 for a calendar, but $15 of that goes to the printer, and while the 100 calendars sold last year added $500 towards the hosting costs, obviously that’s not a fabulous return on a week’s work. I could lower the unit cost considerably by using a “real” printer, but I’d have to fork out of pocket for them up-front plus relying on me to mail them out in a timely fashion is just begging for disaster.
What do y’all think of the final panel of the 2007 XK Calendar? That type of collage takes a bit of time but also allows me to use photos from the web site at native resolution, which means I only need to go through and choose the images, and not worry about chasing folks down for their large originals. (I obviously would be hard-pressed to find time to do a bunch of them.)
Please let me know your thoughts.
I’ve posted a new section which is available from the left-hand navigation–look for “About…” This is a place to get general information about the model in question, such as a model guide, explanations of car numbers, colors, etc. A couple of these used to be available in “resources” but they felt better in a single “general info” section.
The section is also very sparse for some models. The XKE had a head start, and I hope you like my photographic model guide. And the XJ-S has a huge advantage in that Geoffrey Green, a marque expert, was more than kind to write a guide to both the models and the car numbering scheme.
If you would like to pitch in, help is always welcome!
My database server, which is shared between me and goddess knows who else, has been having a lot of issues lately. Unfortunately, site finances are just shy of being able to justify moving to a dedicated server for the data sites…anyway, if you try the site and you get an error message, try again in a bit.
Mainly thanks to the intrepid efforts of PaulS, there are now more than 1,000 Saloons on SaloonData.com.
So, mid-year, how are we doing on our end-of-year guesses?
- XKE Data
9,276 cars, 48,207 photos. Looks like it might be a bit tough to get to 10,000 cars, but 50,000 photos should be no problem.
- XK Data
3,573 cars, 8,841 photos. I’m cautiously hopeful there might be 4,000 XKs, and 10,000 photos should be the case.
- Saloon Data
1,003 cars, 3,010 photos. I’d be a bit surprised if this exceeds 1,100 cars and 3,300 photos.
- XJS Data
890 cars, 2,631 photos. I think 1,000 cars is probably about right, with 3,000 photos. Many thanks to jagman for his intrepid efforts on this site.
- Healey Data
106 cars, 774 photos. This site is an experiment (in a way) as to what happens if you just start the site from scratch without a “champion.” I seeded it with about 80 cars, and Paul has added a few. It goes to show just how much effort Paul puts in on the site. We might get to 200 cars and 1,000 photos by year’s end.
Total: 14,848 cars, 63,463 photos.
888981
Enjoy the photos Bruno has recently added of his 3.8 E-Type Coupe. Very tasty indeed.
I’ve received a fabulous batch of XJS info from Geoffrey Green. I hope to add it by month’s end…it’s really great stuff.
Sorry about the lack of updates here, but work has been keeping me busy, plus the never-ending battle against spammers…sigh.
I changed the way spam entries are attempted to be captured to make it less of a pain to add an entry about cars. I swear, I’m gonna can the forums again…we’ll see.
A site visitor kindly pointed out that the nav bar on the left had some issues in IE…they should be fixed now. Please feel free to email me if you see something that doesn’t look right. This must have been the case for weeks. Not good!
For some reason, the last three months or so this site has periods of slow database performance which we weren’t suffering from before. The only real solution is to go from shared hosting to hanging our own box on the network, I’m weighing the costs. So bear with us if you find the site a bit slow!
If you’d like to be more directly involved in helping with the site, please drop me a line. Larry H. is doing a great job finding XJ-S cars, and of course Paul S. is the king of E-Types, XKs, and Classic Saloons. The Healey site currently is an orphan–if they’re a passion of yours and you have some free time you just can’t find anything to do with, well…
So, would anyone be interested in 2008 Calendars? 
