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

Fast approaching! Pretty remarkable.

(It’s an interesting contrast to watch the Saloon eBay auctions versus XK and E-Type. It always seems that the majority of saloons are restoration projects, while most of the sports cars have already been restored at least once.)

I’ve tested this in Firefox, IE7 and IE6. It seems to be working. I have not tested it on a Mac, as mine died, but it should work in Firefox and Safari on the Mac. I have no idea about Opera…can’t make any promises there. Please let me know if it isn’t working, after being sure your cache is refreshed.

There’s another new site, “Healey Data“ to record the “big” Austin Healey models–the 100, 100 Six and 3000. I’ve run Big Healeys at austinhealey.com for ten years or more, though it’s essentially been fallow since 1999! I figured the easiest way for me to make for a more up-to-date version was to adapt this model to the Healey site, since I don’t have time to maintain both. I’ll probably keep the original around as a “museum piece” as it is fun as an example of a “cutting edge” 1995/1996 web site.

There are still a few things needed on the new site (please let me know of any bugs you find!), but give it a shot if you’re interested in Healeys.

One of the things I’m working on adapting to all of the data sites is the concept of a “catalog” as found on the original Healey site. This would be a location for technical info, a model overview, some historic comparisons–the color guides currently found in the resources section would live there, too. I’d also like to do “10 minute buyer’s guides” that would live in this new section.

These 10 minute guides would not be comprehensive like the one our friend Pete Crespin has written for the E-Type. Rather, they would be quick and dirty photo guides that would tell you whether a car you’re looking at is worth investigating further or is something to run from as fast as you can–or pay very little for. Sort of a cheat sheet to quickly assess the quality of a car–how many of us take as long as we should when looking at a car as a buyer? But there are usually half a dozen places to peek at that will really tell you a lot about a car. That’s what I want to cover.

In any case, this all takes time, and I would love help on these pieces if you’re of a mind.

The tabs at top right will probably be replaced with a drop down box as the sites will soon be too numerous for the tabs to accommodate (I’m working on a Sunbeam Talbot [!] version of these sites by request). JavaScript browsers will get a fancy-pants version while non-JavaScript browsers will get a plain drop down box.

The front page of the web sites now feature slide shows. I realize that a fair number of folks have been simply reloading the front page to make their own impromptu slide show–now it’s done for you.

IE 7, Firefox and Safari users get a semi-transparent background on the caption bar; IE 6 users get a solid background.

Update: I don’t really have bandwidth issues at this point, but if I do, I may limit the slideshows to, say, 100 images per session. I may do that anyway just in case someone boots up the site and then goes on vacation.

Update update: I set the limit at 200 slides, which is over half an hour of viewing pleasure. It resets if you visit any other page on the site…so it’s really just to prevent the vacation scenario.

As a few users have found out, there are always some surprises when I set up a new system, in this case, the decoding of VIN numbers.

For one, tonight a user presented me with a VIN for an XJ-S that has an assembly plant code of “K.” They should all be “C” as far as I know, and “K” doesn’t even map out to a modern Jaguar plant. Anyone have an idea?

I also need to do a better job of sorting search results with the early and late style cars, which I promise to get around to one of these decades.

Update: After 1987 that VIN position was swapped for emissions control specification. Of course, with that particular set of VIN numbers there’s no date code so you can’t do a straight-up check to see whether the position is factory or emissions… The standard North American VINs look smarter and smarter.